The day burned down to its end, the love they could neither give nor receive from those flung under the selfsame slabs, now after sundown, after ash, after their uniting like brothers, recalls and reclaims those unloved. Now on the eve of departure from here when the sun and not only the sun is nearly set, Celan and Fondane have united in brotherly love with the forever unloved, on the final road toward themselves, up there in the eternal and non-eternal depths:
“me here, me, who could tell you all this could have and don’t and didn’t tell you; me with a turk’s cap lily on my left, me with corn-salad, me with my burned candle, me with the day, me with the days, me here and me there, me, maybe accompanied — now by the love of those I didn’t love, me on the way to myself, up here.”
The frail, the silent, the short one who hides beneath the undulating dusk of the Seine goes on speaking to the lofty one, with long locks and lofty shadow, smoky, smoking, diffusing smoke. Klein speaks to Gross, without being able to tell him the too much that would be told in the unspoken language that Celan tries again, overwhelmed, in the Con-Versation (or Speaking With) in the Mountains. Black parody: the conversation is not conversation and the mountains are not mountains. Carefully, Paul Celan, the author — like Rilke and Trakl, among the flowers and flora that are not for Gross or Klein, nor are they for him, Paul Celan — is turned toward the candle that neither he, nor Klein or Gross, nor Fondane have forgotten and toward the Day burned down to its end.
Love: they have not been able to give and receive as they would have wished. Hurled under the same wandering shadow, on the eve of departure, of the ultimate exile, when the sun and not only the sun is going down, Celan and Fondane have met and been brothers, finally with the forever unloved, now in the hour of ash, in their ascension toward themselves.
Translated by Jean Harris, September 2011
Notes
1. From Paul Celan, Conversation in the Mountains, 1959. Translated from the German by Florin Bican, 2011.
2. In the manuscript version the text was named Gespräch im Graubünden after the Swiss canton Grissons (Ger. Graubünden) in which it was written.
3. Europe, 861–862 (January — February, 2001).
4. Yale University Press, 1995.
5. “A prototype for ‘Gespräch im Gebirg’ was the novella Lenz, by Georg Buchner … Celan felt some sympathy with Nietzsche and inscribed a copy of his story ‘In memory of Sils Maria and Friedrich Nietzsche, who — as you know — wanted to have all anti-Semites shot.’ … Also hovering behind ‘Conversation in the Mountains’ was Franz Kafka, whose Excursion into the Mountains Celan translated into Romanian after the war …. Above all, ‘Gespräch im Gebirg’ owes to Martin Buber, whose philosophical writings and retellings of Hasidic tales Celan was reading during the late 1950s …. A visceral presence in the ‘Conversation’ must surely be Mandelshtam.” Felstiner, pp. 140–141.
6. Felstiner, p. 144.
7. Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 124.
8. Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
9. Paul Celan, Selected Works, Vol. 1., p. 135 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1983).
10. The Longest Shadow, p. 54.
11. From Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi Assault on Humanity, translated by Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 8.
SOME THOUGHTS ON SAUL BELLOW
I
Often novels provoke readers to believe that they can best be understood as thinly veiled arguments, responses to topical, controversial issues. Reviewers “translate” fictional events into their “reallife” foundations and unmask characters by identifying the actual “models” on whom they are based. Some years ago, when Saul Bellow’s final novel, Ravelstein, appeared, I was shocked at the book’s reception, not only in the United States, but in my native country, Romania, where reviewers prattled incessantly about issues such as “political correctness” and “the Holocaust industry” as if Bellow’s novel had been written mainly to instruct us on such matters. And I was struck, too, by the confidence with which these reviewers speculated about the real-life counterparts of characters, as if there was little question about Bellow’s sentiments and intentions.
Of course there was reason for Romanians to be interested in Bellow, and not merely because he was a very great writer. The Dean’s December is partly set in Romania, and though Ravelstein has relatively little to do with events in Romania, the peripheral figure Radu Grielescu somewhat resembles Mircea Eliade, and the novel alludes in passing to E.M. Cioran, among other Romanian characters. American readers, noting these elements, may have paid them little attention, but in Romania, as also in the Romanian diaspora, it seemed that these were the most important aspects of those novels.
In the United States, to be sure, Ravelstein was also much discussed as a roman-à-clef. Debate focused on Bellow’s relations with his friend Allan Bloom, who was, apparently, the model for Ravelstein himself. Was the elitist ideologue and acerbic cultural critic in fact the figure portrayed in Bellow’s novel? Were the frailties and frivolities depicted in the novel invented, or did they belong to Bloom himself? Was the portrait a “betrayal” of a long friendship? These were the questions most insistently directed at the novel by many American reviewers, who were, in their own way, as obsessed with Bellow’s motives and the politics of the novel as were Romanian readers. The media’s tendency to look for scandal and secrets was something Bellow understood all too well, and he surely recognized all of the familiar signs in the responses inspired by Ravelstein and earlier books.
Cynthia Ozick offered a necessary corrective to this tendency when she wrote: “When it comes to novels, the author’s life is nobody’s business. A novel, even when it is autobiographical, is not an autobiography. If the writer himself breaks the news that such-and-such character is actually so-and-so in real life, readers still have an obligation — fiction’s enchanted obligation — to shut their ears and turn away …. Fiction is subterranean, not terrestrial. Or it is like Tao: say what it is, and that is what it is not …. The originals vanish; their simulacra, powerful marvels, endure.” The statement is informed by characteristic good sense, and if it is not always possible to follow the terms of the “enchanted obligation,” we can surely understand that it is important for us, as readers, to do our best with it, if only to prevent ourselves from indulging the penchant for gossip and oversimplification promoted in the mainstream literary press.
Of course there are other reasons to be wary of readings that move more or less effortlessly from fiction to “reality.” Probably the most significant of these is that, in yielding to such readings, we swallow misleading “information” about the so-called historical record and ignore the contradictory signals and ambiguities that are essential features of the novelistic text. In Ravelstein, Bellow includes dates and facts that support the connection between Radu and Eliade, but he also provides other information that flagrantly contradicts that presumed connection. Accusations leveled against Radu in the novel usually come not from the narrator, Chick, but from his wife, Rosamund, and from Ravelstein. At times, the narrator timidly defends Radu against the charges, though the defense soon comes to seem increasingly ambiguous and ironic. “Grielescu was a follower of Nae Ionescu, who founded the Iron Guard,” announces Ravelstein emphatically, as if he were comfortably familiar with names and organizations most sophisticated American readers wouldn’t know at all. Nor, for that matter, will the reader know that Nae Ionescu did not found the Iron Guard. Are we to believe that there is some intention here to overwhelm Chick with false information? And does any of this material count for very much in the framework of the novel as a whole? Ravelstein isn’t a historian in the novel that bears his name, and there are several absurdities he scatters among his frothy paradoxical digressions.