It is almost supremely appropriate, somehow, that Romanian poet Paul Celan is most famous—overwhelmingly so—for a work of verse that can be described as an outlier among his work. Certainly, it must be considered atypical in relation to his later development. Written in 1948 when the author was not yet even thirty years old, “Death Fugue” is longer than the typical Celan verse, more accessible by virtue of its absence of his later move into surrealism, and structured with a firmer grasp of internal logic easily followed. Each line is narratively served by that which precedes it and thoughts are expressed as complete sentences with a syntax more representative of the written word as opposed to his later work which replicates the stream of consciousness of thought and is often lacking in “clue words” that readers depend upon for meaning and context.
Consider, for example, what is probably the most famous lines attributed to Celan, found near the end of “Death Fugue.”
“Death is a German-born master his eye is so blue
He shoots with lead bullets he shoots you his aim is so true”
While it is poetic in its use of metaphor as imagery to lead naturally to the rhyme, it isn’t what one might term “poetry-y.” By which is meant all that fanciful of language which automatically separates verse from prose for many people. Such as, for instance, this excerpt from a much more typical example of the overall bulk of Celan’s verse. “Language Mesh” commences with these opening lines:
“Eye’s roundness between the bars.
Vibratile monad eyelid
propels itself upward,
releases a glance.”
“Death Fugue” is a poem for people who hate poetry. It is, for all practical purposes, a work of prose constructed in poetic form. It brings to life a Nazi death camp to which the injury of certain death is given insult by forcing the doomed Jewish inmates to dig their own graves. Yes, sure, four of the six stanzas all begin with the repetition of the imagery: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it come evening” and “Black milk of daybreak we drink you come night.” But aside from that literary device, it is a poem which mostly discharges the work of language trickery which comprises those poems that create people who hate poetry.
The horrors of the Holocaust changed everything. World War II represents a line of demarcation between the comfortable belief in the existence of certain absolutes that marked the world before the rise of Hitler and the complete annihilation of all those certainties in the aftermath. Celan wrote of his belief that there was really one thing which had survived intact through that darkness, but even it had been transformed. That thing was language and the ability to engage it for communication, but in the decades which followed the war, Celan recognized and accepted that using language to communicate in the belief that it was forthright and straightforward had been a myth. The only way language can really be a tool of communication is through what one might say are the parts that remain unspoken.
Thus, the direct quality of “Death Fugue” which made Celan famous is gradually overtaken and ultimately replaced by a reliance upon ambiguity. Imagery is displaced by incongruity. Symbolism is eaten by irony and paradox. Each of those literary elements—opacity, contradiction and inconsistency—would also serve to define the legacy of Celan’s work as a poet for the rest of his life. He will likely remain forever most famous for a poem which defies the subversive foundation of the bulk of body of work and adding another layer of irony to this situation is that “Death Fugue” was not even written with the intention of being a counterpoint to that subversion. It just is what is. And that, for most readers, has proven to be more than enough.
