Celan's Synthesiser
1.
named quiet aside-
light
gulp
whole sight-edge
2.
Kielspar insurmountable splay
said
refuge crescent moon
moored barb
3.
unreadable
just think beg works
cure a leaf
skin up to the sky
Alles
4.
crumbled empty
edge of vision
astraddle conversation
grubbing oath
stronger way ahead
flowered heavenward
deepest
5.
imagine
dew before
flooding luster
leaf you open
leave then
other
6.
Hymne stronger fire red
pre-dated stillness
evidence weighing bread
vow profuse
other shore
wandered-along
7.
cobbles
Ein blatt stalemate
teaches unconstricted
flapping decoy
tardrenched
suburbs
8.
clip round
illegibility trash whole
pavestones megaphone
Dich
9.
stand
shirt incandescent
confirm second dummy gurgling
brightness
heart-shadow-rope
10.
spat snow-comfort flashlights
Evidenz flesh
hear grid teaches
silence
glad for the passage
11.
boat torn-up crime
skin
side-
lit
depths radiant blood
garbage
spot
12.
pipe
insurmountable nursing
talk
flowered catmouthed all barbs
adult (bird) bill
13.
putt, putt, putt conversation slip
hear meadow
other time deepest
Still vault
oozing
backwash heart-shadow’s rope
14.
a leaf words
shelter
here-sidedness
all things makes stronger
unbinded
solicit patch
burning red
skiff
15.
flutend swallow riverbanks
swampy
illegible
barb pre-given
squeak nameable mired
Note
‘Celan’s Synthesizer’ takes late poems by Paul Celan and his translators from the collections, Atemwende, Fadensonnen, Lichtzwang, Schneepart and Zeitgehöft to create fifteen new poems. For this I created the ‘synthesizer’. Using the model of the music synthesizer, where flutes, strings, and other musical instruments are represented and played with the stroke of one key, I took words from particular poems in the German, and their various versions in English, and organised them into a grid, from left to right listing the word by Celan, then followed by the Hamburger translation, Felstiner, Washburn and Guillemin, Joris, Fairley and Popov and McHugh. Then, I selected the words, or ‘played’ them to create new poems. The rules were to use each word only once, and to select one word from each translation for each of the poems. The results are a series of variations dreamt up at the keyboard in kind of homage to Celan and his translators.
Resources
Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris, (Green Integer: Los Angeles, 2006)
Fathomsuns and Benighted, translated by Ian Fairley, (Carcanet: Manchester, 2001)
Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh, (Wesleyan University Press: Middletown Connecticut, 2000)
Last Poems, translated by Katherine Washburn and Margret Guillemin, (North Point Press: San Francisco, 1986)
Paul Celan: Selections, edited with an introduction by Pierre Joris, (University of California Press: Berkeley; Los Angeles, 2005)
Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger, (Anvil Press Poetry: London, 2007)
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, (W.W. Norton: New York and London, 2001)
Snowpart/Schneepart, translated by Paul Fairley, (Carcanet: Manchester, 2007)
Threadsuns, translated by Pierre Joris, (Green Integer: Los Angeles, 2005)
Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo
November, 2010
Simon Smith
Simon Smith's fourth collection of poetry is London Bridge (2010). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.