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today's reading | collected prose by paul celan
Even when collected, Celan's prose makes for a slim volume—the book contains some speeches, a pair of brief forewords, a letter, a set of epigrammatic fable-ettes, a cryptic short story, and two or three other oddments. That's it. It's enough prose to fill one evening's worth of reading, and given Celan's long committment to minimalism and silence, we should probably feel lucky that we even get that much.
Brevity notwithstanding, the contents here serve as a welcome addendum to Celan's poetry. His entire body of work can be read as an attempt to reconcile two beliefs: a belief in the ability of writing to embody the voice of absolute otherness—original, strange, perhaps ultimately indecipherable—and an equally deeply-held belief in the virtues of communication, of conversation and encounter. This lifelong attempt at reconciliation yields a set of tensions which serve as the animating force behind his poems: the modest stack of writing in this volume, taken collectively, provides additional insight into Celan's attempt to chart these worthy human tensegrities in their full complexity. Recommended.
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Sunday, November 14, 2004
10:05 PM
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