Mark -- & others -- just back from quick swing through England & Luxembourg,
& don't have much time to get into a discussion that does, however, interest
me profoundly. But quickly, Mark suggests that:
>we're probably misunderstanding Eliot and Pierre--the statements as given
are
>simply bizarre. Why should the poem as translated into American English be
>stranger or more difficult than the poem read in the original by a speaker
>of American English competent in the original language? It certainly
>shouldn't be less so, but why more? Sounds rather like a translator's
cop-out."

No, Mark: what I am suggesting is that translation of a very difficult,
richly polysemous poetry such as Celan's work will most likely end up with a
translated text that is less elegant or more difficult/awkward to read
because if the translator tries to keep as much of the difficulty/complexity
of the original language, then that will do something to the translation.
And if the target language goes for elegance, simplicity, transparency than
in all likelihood it will need to jettison some or even a range of the
originbal's knottiness. Here's an example: Celan has very elegant invented
images/word-constructions that are beautiful and simple enough to the German
ear as behind them one hears the German expression they play off on, but
this subtext is not available to the translator's language & so that
image-rime cannot do its clarifying job, leaving the translation with a more
difficult or puzzling image. In paronomastic formations such as “rauchdünn”
(smoke-thin) one hears the common expression “hauchdünn” (paper-thin;
literally, breath-thin); similarly one hears "Morgenrot" ("the red of dawn,"
literally, "morning-red") in “Morgen-Lot,” (morning-sounder or -plumb) —
such exempla could be extended ad infinitum.

In relation to Celan there is are further problems with translating him into
English, and let me just paste in here a page from the talk a gave in London
(one I don't think I actually got when giving the talk):

"If knowledge of these and similar complexities in Celan’s language [I had
been talking about the paranomastic formations mentioned above] have
anything to tell the translator it is essentially this: Celan’s language,
though German on the surface, is a foreign language, even for native
speakers. Celan's German is an eerie, nearly ghostly language: it is both
mother-tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a
language the poet has to make up, to re-create, to re-invent, to bring back
to life. One could say that Celan raids the German language — & I use the
military metaphor advisedly, for there seems to me to run through Celan’s
life if not a desire for assault on Germany and revenge for the death of his
parents (or of his mother before all), then at least a constant, unrelenting
sense of being on a war footing, of being under attack & needing to counter
this attack. The Celanesque dynamic is, however, not simple-minded or
one-directional: it involves a complex double movement — to use the terms of
Empedocles — of _philotes_  (love) for his mother(’s tongue) and of _neikos_
(strife) against her murderers who are the originators and carriers of that
same tongue.
        This profound alienation in relation to his writing language is the very
ground upon which and against which Celan works, or, to use the Heraclitian
formula: Celan is estranged from that which is most familiar. As he wrote:
“Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.” Reality for
Celan, maybe more so than for any other poet this century, was the word, was
language. Radically dispossessed of any other reality he set about to create
his own language — a language as absolutely exiled as he himself. To try to
translate it as if it was current, commonly spoken or available German would
be to miss an essential aspect of the poetry, that of a linguistic
under-mining & displacement that creates a multi-perspectivity mirroring and
reticulating the polysemous meanings of the work. Celan’s “language” is
really a number of dismantled and recreated languages. ...
        ...There one further problem facing the English or American translator of
Celan. It concerns what I like to call the present episteme of American
poetry, i.e. the set of presuppositions, linguistic and historical, which
determine to a great extent how we hear and what we recognize as “good”
poetry and, by extension, good translations. This episteme, so revivifying
for American poetry over the last half century, demands that the language of
poetry be as close as possible to the spoken, colloquial language of today.
In relation to translating Celan this can all too often induce the
temptation for the English versions to oversimplify the original poem, by
making short thrift of the oddities of the word constructions & by ironing
out the twists & quirks of Celan's syntax, in a doomed attempt to make the
language sound “natural”. Yet the development of Celan’s poetry away from
the traditional metrics & rhymes still present in the early work towards a
line based on different units (breath, syllable, word), is not without
recalling certain developments in American poetry — one need only think of
Olson’s injunctions in the “Projective Verse” essay concerning a new
breath-based metrics or compare the tight vowel-leading poetics of Louis
Zukofsky’s poem “A” with similar attentions in Celan’s work...."

Okay... more, as I can,

Pierre