Very quickly and without a text at hand to check what I'm about to say--
I think Celan is different and does not emit the same problems, and I'm not
entirely suprised about Alison's friend's reaction. I think this is because
however difficult and sometimes occulted it gets, and it certainly does,
there is a kind of symbolic arena in which the poem takes place, developed
smoothly through from his earlier work. His way of -mentioning- things,
usually in the definite case, always assumes this fictive locality, and its
possible relationship to a known world. What is mentioned always somehow
belongs between there and a singular earthly location. So the reader in a
sense does know where he/she is, or that what is mentioned could be a way
of writing the known real through the unknown person, even if we can't
necessarily see what the occulted connections are. The reader may be
"defeated" but without having to feel under attack -- even while welcomed
to the text's space. I hope this sounds authentic to the German-speakers.
That Celan never wrote anything "better" than Death-fugue is an opinion
which will always be ventured or denied according to where you "stand", but
I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand.
I've always thought the readiness of the British poetry establishment to
give ear to late Celan (even into Penguin) at the same as denying ear to
quite comparable work in English, a stark piece of public hypocrisy.
Possibly the 1939-45/ holocaust/ suicide explanation is accepted by "them"
as a substitute for having to know what is happening in the poetry. There
were several works in the 1970s in Britain in a mode harmonious to Celan's,
such as the book Blood Flow by Anthony Barnett.
/PR
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