camera obscura

“We speak of dark things”

“We exchange dark words”

“We speak darkness to each other”

These are attempts to translate the line from “Corona”, a poem originally written in German by Paul Celan. This line is also the title of the book I discovered surfing online :“Wir sagen uns Dunkles” by German scholar Helmut Böttiger. Not yet translated in English, I accepted the challenge and got the German edition: it tells the story of the encounter between Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, two future stars of German letters, but still unknown to the world when they met, in the spring of 1948 in Wien.

I have been personally obsessed with the idea of translation since studying classical languages at school: it is the most fascinating and frustrating process, the attempt to make a language overlap the other, to make them fit perfectly, like a glove. But exactly as a glove, the translation always conceals the body underneath, which animates it but remains ultimately unattainable.

In translation, the original text always must give up something, part of its meaning, music, references, syntax, but it also gains something: a new life, a new audience.

To think about it, when we love, we make an active effort to translate ourselves, to make ourselves accessible to the other. In doing so, we have to give up something, something that its at the same time essential and neglectable: the mythical “untranslatable”.

Wir sagen uns Dunkles / We tell each other darkness.

What does this darkness refer to? Critics have rushed to say that Celan, an eastern European Jew who survived the camps and fled to Wien in 1948, when he wrote this poem, aged 28, was referring to his dark past, the horror of war, the feeling of homelessness. And yet “Corona” is a very intimate, romantic poem, quite unlike all the rest of Celan’s body of work, which is usually, yes, very dark.

The poem in exam draws a nocturnal, dream-like landscape:

“it is Sunday in the mirror

[…] Asleep/ the mouth speaks the truth.

[…] Wir sagen uns Dunkles

we love each other like poppy and memory

and sleep like wine in mussels”

The clangor and darkness of war have been left outside and do not enter this private space. Dunkles is a dimly-lit room, the whisper of two lovers, pillow-talking, half asleep, about something obscure, not completely clear, even to themselves. It is the untranslatable.