Paul Celan (1920-1970):
A Bi-Lingual Poetry Reading
To Commemorate the Thirtieth
Anniversary of his Death


Thursday 23 November 2000, 5.30-7.30

At the Institute of English Studies, Rm 349, University of London
Senate House (3rd Floor), Malet Street


Readers: Michael Hamburger and Pierre Joris

With Recordings of Celan’s voice


Paul Celan (formerly Ancel), the Romanian Jewish poet, was born in
Czernowitz in Bukovina (a German enclave of Romania) in 1920. Uprooted, like
millions of others, during the course of the World War, and interned in a
labour camp, after the war Celan fled, first to Bucharest, and thence to
Vienna, before settling in Paris in 1948. Although he was accorded a series
of literary honours after the war, Celan suffered a series of deep
depressions, and found the burden of writing poetry in German (his native
tongue) in the aftermath of what he called ‘That which happened’, a painful
and burdensome necessity. Shortly after attending a conference on Hölderlin
in 1970, Celan drowned himself in the River Seine. Since his death Celan’s
reputation has continued to grow, and his work has received the attention of
some of the foremost philosophers and critics of the postwar period,
including Hans Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and George Steiner.

To commemorate the unforgettable lyric presence of Celan, and the terrible
silence from which he spoke, we have asked two of the most important
translators of Celan’s verse into English Michael Hamburger (Poems of Paul
Celan, Anvil Press, 1988) and Pierre Joris (Breath-turn, Sun & Moon Press,
1995 and Threadsuns, Sun & Moon Press, 2000) to read some of their
renderings of Celan’s words, together with the original German poems. The
event is being held on the date of Celan’s birth November 23, on what would
have been his eightieth birthday.

The reading will be followed by a wine reception given by the Institute of
English Studies.

Organised jointly by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck
College, and the English Department of Royal Holloway and Bedford New
College, University of London.

“Poems make toward something . . . something standing open, occupiable,
perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.” (Paul
Celan)

Institute of English Studies: 0207 862 8675.  E mail: [log in to unmask]

______________________________________________________________________
Pierre Joris		The problems of prosody for a narrative of pitchers
6 Madison Place	are the pitchers’ problems of the musculature facing home…
Albany NY 12202
Tel:  (518) 426-0433					Kenneth Irby
Fax: (518) 426-3722
Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Url: <http://www.albany.edu/~joris>
____________________________________________________________________________
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
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Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 7:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Festival


Hugh wrote:

>'The emotions are not skilled workers' but to paraphrase
>Ern Malley,
>I'm also not at all sure the antipodeans are skilled workers,
>though the best have great techniques. I'm surprised
>too that the above reviewer doesn't agree.

I am attempting to give up my youthful vice of generalising from the
particular.

But surely the review's introduction contra-indicates any blanket
judgement of contemporary poetry, in Australia or anywhere else:

"Craft is probably the least interesting approach to questioning poetry,
and the most susceptible to schlerotic conservatisms.  It raises the
question of what makes a "good" poem, and can be so easily hijacked to
formulaic rules.  And this abuts the uneasy question of what constitutes
current poetic practice, and how to evaluate it in the absence of
"standards".

One response to this dilemma has been to abandon all discrimination in
favour of a weakly promisicuous "supportiveness", which strikes me as
tantamount to an abandonment of poetry itself.  But to reject this
approach raises the question of how to respond to a poem at all.  Poems
matter to me because of their beauty, intelligence, passion, vitality,
excitement: but how do you measure the measureless, or define the
indefinable?  And in any case, is it at all desirable to do so?

Perhaps ultimately these questions can only be passed over in silence,
although they seem germane to the art of poetry, and especially pressing
in discussing the current diversities of poetic practice.

When poetry abandoned metrical devices and measures almost a century ago,
it laid bare the question of what constitutes a prosody.   The most
interesting contemporary poetry meets this question head on in a myriad
of ways, ranging from a deeply questioning restoration of formalities to
a more thorough smashing of language itself.  But in many places a
dreadful orthodoxy has rushed in to fill the vacuum left by conventional
rhyme: a free verse which is, in fact, anything but free or verse."

I also meekly point out that the par you quote only refers to one of the
books.  I might as well quote the whole paragraph, to show more clearly
what I meant by "failure" (if anyone's interested in arguing with the
whole review, it's easily available).

"Walker claims: "Sentimentality / is what we need".  No: _feeling_ is
what we need.  Sentimentality, as Wallace Stevens remarked, is always a
failure of feeling.

But the real problem is not the failing.  We all fail: the best most.
The problem is the complacencies behind these poems, the egocentric
incuriosities of their poetics.  Failure is not possible, because so
little is being attempted."

Alison













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