Michaela Kotziers
on translating Paul Celan
The most difficult task in translating this poem was preserving its ambiguity. When translating, you choose to phrase a line in one way rather than another, and the new language assigns meaning to the poem. Especially when a poem is deeply metaphorical, it can be difficult to separate the task of translation from the task of interpretation. “Wimpern sind kein Zeichen mehr,” for example, might also have been translated to “lashes lose significance” or, more literally, “lashes are no longer signs.” All have quite different implications, none of which are wrong. In the end, “lashes cease to signify” won in order to preserve the rhyme with lines four and eight.
about the author
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Chernivsti, the capital of Bukovina, formerly northern Romania. Because Romania’s medical faculty was closed to him as a Jewish man, Celan began his first years of university study in France in 1938–1939. The Soviet Union occupied Bukovina in 1940, with Chernivtsi later coming under German occupation in 1941. Celan’s parents were sent to forced labor camps in June 1942; his father died some months later from typhus, and his mother was killed by an SS guard. Celan was sent to a forced labor battalion in northeast Romania from the summer of 1942 until early 1944. In 1945, Celan relocated to Bucharest, where he translated Russian into Romanian and published his first poems. Before moving to Paris in 1948, Celan lived in Vienna, his only residence with German as its exclusive vernacular language. His departure from Vienna was an attempt to leave behind his youth and its unbearable memories of war and his parents’ deaths. This geographic and emotional move is also manifested as a break between Celan’s early and later poetic works. Paul Celan died in Paris in April, 1970.
about the translator
Michaela Kotziers received her BA in English literature with concentrations in creative writing and medieval studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. She is currently teaching English in Nuremberg, Germany.
