In his ample monograph, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew,4 John Felstiner contends that Celan’s way of writing Conversation in the Mountains creates an original and spiritual cross between the filmic and written visions of Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett.
Felstiner goes on to suggest other possible sources of inspiration for Celan’s Conversation. These include:
1. Büchner’s novella Lenz, in which the hero loses his mind and wanders through the mountains crying: “I am the wandering Jew!”
2. Thus Spake Zarathustra—itself conceived by Nietzsche at Sils-Maria (Celan would note on a copy of Conversation: “In memory of Sils-Maria and Friedrich Nietzsche who — as you know — wanted to shoot all the anti-Semites),
3. Kafka’s Excursion in the Mountains (which Celan translated into Romanian), as well as
4. Martin Buber’s 1913 Conversation in the Mountains, and
5. Osip Mandelstam’s essay About the Interlocutor which Celan had translated into German (pp. 140–141).5
Any one of these, Felstiner writes, might be the source — the failed meeting with Adorno, the thought of Büchner, Buber, Kafka, the Mandelstam translation. Important here, he goes on to say, is that the narration gives voice: “voices’ long held concerns about language, speech, and naming, all in a talky vein.”6
The American critic comments on the name, “unpronounceable” or unutterable under the Nazis (and not only), as well as on the Jew’s dwelling place “under” the mountains, dissociated from nature, which God has made, “not for you and not for me,” on Celan’s use of language that lacks the Judaic “I and Thou” on which Buber comments, on the summoning of Klein by No One, as well as on the cry “hear me” inspired, evidently by God’s summoning His people (Shema Yisrael—Hear O Israel). Central here is that the Supreme Being has become a silenced No One, both in the Vale of Tears, through which the wanderer is eternally in transit, and in the waste to which the interlocutors (both one and the other) have been sacrificed.
Felstiner refers as well to the denomination Jud—in the tradition of the “Yid” of the ghetto and exile — that Celan uses in place of Jude (Jew), to the “star” that announces Shabbat, and to the replacement of the term Gespräch (conversation) with Geschwätz, conversation that turns into blather in the aftermath of Auschwitz, rigmarole that jams the funereal, post-mortem silence.
Felstiner underlines, moreover, the borrowing of repetitions, contractions, inversions, diminutives, interrogatives, and idioms with which Yiddish furnishes the author’s “Austrian” German. Most important is that he hears a “farewell to silence” in this 1958 text. The language “gains voice” in its wounded German-Yiddish, as Celan says in the Conversation’s final words: “I here and I there, I, accompanied now! — through the love of those unloved. I on the way toward me, myself.”
Speaking to himself through the alternating voices of those twowanderers who meet when “the sun and not only the sun was nearly set,” Celan maintains the role and the position of the stray, wandering in perpetual expectation of meeting.
Ilana Shmueli, Celan’s friend, correspondent and lover — comparable, I think, to Kafka’s Milena — affirms with good reason that Celan needed this “other” (a Thou) as recipient and echo of the message cast into the sea of uncertainties. “We knew already in advance that each time Celan would need a Thou in his poems, generally a feminine Thou, a versatile Thou on whom he would call and by whom he wanted to be heard.”
Poets being androgynous, this Thou certainly could have been not only his “Milena” from Cernàu
ti and Israel, Ilana, but also the German Adorno “believed to be Jewish,” or his predecessor from Prague, Kafka, or the teacher, Buber, or his confrere, Osip, sacrificed to the Gulag, but also other survivor-scribes of the brown, green, or red horrors.
More than any other, the hypothetical interlocutor might have been and might still be, in the posterity of both, the poet Fundoianu / Fondane.
B. Fundoianu was born in the same month (November) as Celan, twenty-two years earlier, a bit less than “a quarter” of the 120-year lifespan of the biblical Jew. Not only that: Fundoianu began life in the selfsame Romania, in the city of Iasi, the capital of Moldavia, then full of Jews, not far from Celan’s “Little Vienna,” Cernàuti,” the capital of Bucovina, then full of Jews, for Romania’s former neighboring province of Galicia (once part of the Habsburg Empire) had been returned to Romania in 1918 (Cernowitz becoming Cernàuti in the transfer). It was then partially occupied by the Soviets in 1941 and reoccupied by the Romanian and German armies. After the war, the territory remained divided between Romania and the Soviet Union, where Cernowitz would become the Ukrainian city Chernivtsi.
Barely pronounceable when not simply “unpronounceable” or unutterable, like a curse, Pessach Antschel’s name became Paul Antschel before solidifying as Paul Celan, which made it a natural brother to Benjamin Wechsler’s, which became Barbu or B. Fundoianu (a Romanization), then Benjamin Fondane (which is “French”) — the name ultimately tattooed to the skin of the page by his destiny as martyr.
When Fondane disappeared into Auschwitz in 1944, Celan was 24 years old. He had lost his parents in “Trans-Tristia” (as I called Transnistria) and was dreaming of Paris as “l’endroit idéal pour rater sa vie,” as Cioran would write me one day.
On the walls of Celan’s room in Paris hung a reproduction of a celebrated funeral mask (known as L’inconnue de la Seine) belonging to a beautiful unknown woman whose face bore a mysteriously serene expression, evoked by Nabokov, Rilke, and Aragon. The body of the suicide had been recovered from the Seine at some point, the mask saved at the Parisian morgue.
In a striking parallel, it was in Paris, whence Fondane had been sent to the pyre, that Celan allowed the Seine to extinguish his terrible disquiet along with his verse.
Lost in the fire or water of catastrophe, the two poets, so different from each other, would meet only in martyrdom and through the post-mortem dialogue between each of their lyric I’s. This would be the much aspired to meeting of one ‘semblable’ with the other — each a similar yet dissimilar Thou — that would take place in and through “the great fear” that struck them both like a bolt from the blue — inspired, destroyed, and immortal.
Denis J. Schmidt affirms that “Celan writes as if he would go on living after his death.”7
The End rewound again and again in the funereal pulsation of Memory that will not let itself be pacified: this is the “black milk” Celan continues to drink “in the morning, at noon and at dusk” and in the nights belonging to the unfinished night of the nightmare. The language of poetry contracts itself; death fragments and gradually and fatally diminishes (to zero) the state of existence in nonexistence — being in nothingness. Poetry, which is to say life, persists as delay. Unmistakable and irrevocable. Brief scintillations of light and illusion under the dark, gloomy tutelage of the Inevitable, watched over by the damned oracle. Repeating the sentence embedded in Memory that will not let itself be betrayed, deceived or jerked around in any way. Death doesn’t allow itself frivolities; it operates impeccably like a German master clockmaker, morbid and precise, whose funeral gong prolongs an infinite torture by echo, the echo prolonged in posterity and quickened again through poetry.