Michaela Kotziers
on translating Paul Celan
Moving to Germany this past year has brought on a number of changes in my life, from the way that I drink my coffee, to keeping a travel bag packed for a new city every other weekend. These changes, of course, don’t begin to touch what it’s like to live in a new language, to feel at times that you’ve once again become a child lost for words. I spend many of my afternoons in Nuremberg walking through the city’s parks. Trees have always helped me to feel at home, no matter where I’ve moved. There’s something reassuring about seeing tree branches in a new place and thinking, Yes, they’re peaceful here, too. I was disappointed to realize, though, that when I tried to describe the quiet of these parks in German, the language in which they’d grown, I fell short. So when I came across a collection of Paul Celan’s early works in the city library and saw how many poems he’d written about parks and meadows, I felt a rush of gratitude for his words. I find translation to be an act of coming closer to a poem. You engage with every word before carrying the whole into a new language. Translating Celan has brought me closer to his individual poems and the German language, but even more importantly, it’s reminded me that our thoughts and emotional relationships to this world are shared. The impressions that I had in English existed in German as well, already years before. And this is why I love translation. It challenges us to look beyond something artificial, such as language, and find kinship with other humans.
Translating from German to English always brings trouble when it comes to German definite articles and their cases, which simply don’t exist in English. Without definite articles to indicate accusative and nominative case, there’s less freedom to change the order of subject and object in an English sentence. For this reason, I’ve reordered words in certain lines but otherwise stayed quite close to the original.
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.
