Citation

Bollack J. Psyche (E Klett) 2000; 54(5): 399-425.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, Ernst Klett Verlag)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Délires. On delimitation and de-limitation in the poetry of Paul Celan. - Whose voice do we hear in Celan's poems? An "I", a "you"? The author investigates the grim word-games played out between these two poles and the contradictions and travesties involved. The idiom of Celan's poems is blackened by the smoke of the extermination camps, it is wrought in and by the intolerable tension between the language of the slaughterers and a response to it that can only find voice as a trans-formation of language. These are not "committed" poems in the customary sense, more like a burrowing of passages through the mass graves of the victims. But against the facile assumption that there is a pathological core in the tortured incomprehensibility and obscurity of Celan's poems, convenient in explaining his suicide as being a consequence of insight into the ultimate inadequacy of poetic language to truly reflect its dreadful subject, the author pits the specific logic of artistic creation and the poet's full personal responsibility for his act, a responsibility born of the awareness of his own illness.

Language: en

Keywords

art; awareness; human; language; literature; logic; responsibility; review; suicide; torture; victim; voice