Paul Celan's Lights Against: The Darkness of the Wandering Jew Israel today

There are creators for whom writing is the result of endless speech, which breaks out of a tumultuous inner floating begging to get out, hold on to a page and find rest in it.

In contrast, there are creators whose writing stems from an internal stutter, an attempt to allow broken words that have not yet been assembled from the inside to appear and have existence on a page.

The writing of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan - one of the most important poets of the 20th century - is all stuttering and verbal exploration.

Celan's tongue was broken, silenced and recreated, after the murder of his mother and the death of his father in the Nazi ghetto in his hometown of Chernivtsi, Romania.

Celan survived the inferno and became, by definition, a wandering Jew.

He settled in France, but wrote his poem in the language of his family's killers - German.

His songs became known to the Hebrew audience following the translations of Shimon Zandenbeck. A collection of short prose and aphorisms is now being published, lists from the estate most of which have not been published in the author's life. Collections of sections of the estate, of different lengths and values, naturally tend to be uneven, like a cluttered desk from scattered draft shelves. But they also make it possible to penetrate behind the scenes of the writing, to the trembling in the writer's hand, to hear the thoughts that accompany the works familiar to the reader. "A person must live by his poem if he wants the poem to remain true," Celan writes, drawing an inseparable line between the poem and life.

Celan's prose is short, economical, describing specific moments.

It is somewhat reminiscent of the late prose of Samuel Beckett, also one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, who revealed her muteness and stuttering.

It is often driven by paradoxes, partying and twists that replace their role and dreamy images - "a common dream for rifle bullets: I am a human skull and I pierced a cannon eye".

As befits a poet, the human speech and the role of words in the reality that occupied Celan, it also often stems from paradoxes that reveal the unraveling edges of humanity - "German: a language I do not forget. A language that forgets me."

The collection includes several theoretical texts, such as a textual opening for a surrealist exhibition or Celan's written answers to journalistic questionnaires, prose excerpts and short reflections, alongside texts on the essence of poetry and its role in the world.

What particularly intrigued me before reading the book were the poet's prose passages.

Reading stories of a well-known poet is a bit like hearing the dreams of your favorite pet.

You are exposed to another facet of its existence, a reworking of the inner being.

But the prose passages in this collection are quite immature.

These are undeveloped sketches of mental states delivered in short sentences.

On the other hand, what is interesting about this collection are the more gothic passages in which Celan reveals his attitude to poetry, the "pathological" lists as they are defined here.

Celan devotes a long list to the description of the song's emerging from the darkness, a phrase that is repeated many times in this collection.

"The song came into the world dark; it came into the world as a result of radical individuation, a piece of language, and therefore - that is, as far as language can be a world - it carries with it a world."

This darkness of Celan that the song stems from is something tangible, palpable, and from it is created the intimacy inherent in the poetry. But this is a different touch than the usual touch. It is a touch that is an examination of an inner thought or feeling, an intimate touch of the most hidden layers.

This tangibility is expressed in the perception of the song as a craft - "Crafts are necessary for all poetry ... only real hands write real songs. I do not see any fundamental difference between a handshake and a song." Celan reaches for the depths of the soul, dedicates himself to the darkness and gives its details to the reader.

The personal darkness of Celan's life resonates throughout the collection. Quite a few of the texts show his disappointment with German society's dealing with the horrors of the Holocaust. Two major episodes of his life particularly challenged him and were very present throughout the reading in the collection - a critique of one of his books, in which the strangeness of his poems was compared to his foreign origins, the accusation he experienced as having an antisemitic nucleus, and accusations of stealing songs from another Jewish poet. A "foreign" Jew and a thief, two Cain signs attached to a poet in which he struggled. In quite a few of the texts, Celan came to terms with the extras in these cases, and wrote quite a few bitter and sarcastic sentences on the subject - "(Nazi methods) without risk - according to the recipe: When you come to beat the living Jew, use a dead Jew as much as possible."

Reference to the State of Israel can also be found here.

On his only visit to Israel, Celan likened the establishment of the state to writing a song - "And I understand, among so many things, also the pride and gratitude for all the green planted with your own hands and ready and willing to restore the soul of all who pass here; as I understand the joy of all A new word acquired. "

It is clear that Celan looked at the Zionist act with admiration.

In one sentence, beautiful in its anomaly, Celan finds in the Israeli presence a revolutionary act, one that grows out of the ghosts that haunt him - "Israel is present, Israel is the presence, Israel cannot be invented. Reality, revolutionary, exterminates the ghosts."

Now his spirit is revolutionizing us.

Paul Celan / Lights Against, United Kibbutz, p. 170

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