Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:22:43.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Editor's Column: Uprooted Words on a Bookshelf in Chernivtsi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marianne Hirsch
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

WHEN PAUL CELAN ACCEPTED THE BREMEN LITERATURE PRIZE in 1958, he used the occasion to reflect on the region of his birth: “The landscape from which I—by what detours! But are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you.” On the syntactic level, Celan's speech performs the detours (Umwege), repetitions, and redoublings of his journey to Germany, a country in which he never lived or spent more than a few weeks but whose language he persisted in calling his own:

It is the landscape that was home to a not inconsiderable portion of those Hasidic tales that Martin Buber has retold for us all in German. It was, if I may add to this topographic sketch something that appears before my eyes now from very far away—it was a region in which human beings and books used to live. There, in the former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now fallen into historylessness [Geschichtslosigkeit]… Bremen… still had the ring of the unreachable.… Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. (“Speech” 395; Gesammelte Werke 185-86)

Type
Editorial
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006 , pp. 1393 - 1404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

References

Works Cited

Ausländer, Rose. “Das Erbe.” Versunkene Dichtung der Bukowina. Ed. Colin, Amy and Kittner, Alfred. München: Fink, 1994. 203.Google Scholar
Ausländer, Rose. “Erinnerungen an eine Stadt.” In der Sprache der Mörder: Eine Literatur aus Czernowitz, Bukowina. Ed. Wichner, Ernst and Wiesner, Herbert. Berlin: Literaturhaus, 1993. 33–39.Google Scholar
Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Bechert, Hilde, and Drexel, Klaus, dirs. Paul Celan: Erst jenseits der Kastanien ist die Welt. ARTE, 1994.Google Scholar
Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden. Ed. Alleman, Beda and Reichert, Stefan. Vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983. 5 vols.Google Scholar
Celan, Paul. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen.” Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Trans. John Felstiner. New York: Norton, 2001. 395–96.Google Scholar
Colin, Amy. Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Google Scholar
Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Florence, Heymann. Le crépuscule des lieux: Identités juives de Czernowitz. Paris: Stock, 2003.Google Scholar
Liska, Vivian. “‘Roots against Heaven’: An Aporetic Inversion in Paul Celan.” New German Critique 91 (2004): 41–56.Google Scholar
Osatschuk, Sergij. “Czernowitz heute und der Umgang mit dem gemeinsamen kulturellen Erbe.” Mythos Czernowitz. Deutsches Kulturforum ostlichen Europas, Potsdam. 17–19 Sept. 2004. Czernowitz/Bukowina. 3 Aug. 2006 <http://www.czernowitz.de/index.php?page=seiten&seite=55>..>Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stenberg, Peter. Journey to Oblivion: The End of the East European Yiddish and German Worlds in the Mirror of Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar