Disfiguring Detachment: Celan “Translates” Eckhart
Keywords:
Celan, Eckhart, detachment, disfigurement, poem, translationAbstract
In late 1967, shortly after having been released from a psychiatric hospital, the poet Paul Celan turned his attention to the Middle High German writings of the philosopher, theologian, and mystic Meister Eckhart. Celan’s engagement with Eckhart resulted in the final three poems of the final volume of poetry that Celan was able to submit for publication before committing suicide in 1970. These three poems could thus be said to mark the culmination of Celan’s own work. Yet, this idea might seem strange. What does a late-medieval Dominican have to do with a post-Holocaust Jewish poet? Celan, who bridges and challenges numerous traditions and languages in his poetic activity, would have been drawn to the mediating work of Eckhart’s corpus. Eckhart is the only major theologian of the Middle Ages whose oeuvre survives substantially in both Latin and the vernacular, and Eckhart combines and transforms various movements with consummate linguistic creativity and ease: scholasticism and mysticism, Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, Maimonidean exegesis and Beguine metaphorics, to name a few. However, Celan was also disturbed by Eckhart’s central concept of abegescheidenheit (Modern German Abgeschiedenheit) or «detachment» especially in the wake of the Shoah. In this paper, I survey Celan’s creative appropriation of Eckhart by offering commentaries on his three Eckhart-poems. I focus on the themes of memory and detachment, as well as on how Celan finds himself compelled to poetically translate, to carry across, keywords in one tradition or language (in this case Eckhartian mysticism in Middle High German) in such a way that they take on new, radically different senses. Ultimately, Celan disfigures Eckhart’s key concept of detachment to stress the need for encounter with the Other.
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