humorist Max Beerbohm. Considering that the only other book I’ve written is a collection of literary parodies, I feel a sense of affinity with Felstiner myself.
One of the principal reasons Felstiner was drawn to Celan is not quite so whimsical. Felstiner’s background, he said at Yale, “has something in kindredship to Celan’s own background. If I were born where my father was born, in Lemburg [Germany], I know that my fate would have been much worse than Celan’s. One can document that. But I wasn’t. As my mother used to say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”
Because Felstiner’s father came to America, he did not suffer the same fate as Celan’s father, who was deported in 1942 and presumably killed in a concentration camp. Celan’s mother suffered the same fate. Felstiner said in a talk given at an ALTA conference in October 1994, “Celan came back after one night and found the door barred. He never saw his mother again, and perhaps without reason one of the pictures I keep over my desk whenever I’m translating is a picture of his mother.”
Felstiner has not said very much about his relationship with Celan beyond his stories and the fact that he spent seventeen years of his life translating Celan’s poetry, researching his life in great depth, and writing article after article that culminated in the 1995 book Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Felstiner’s feelings can best be seen obliquely, for example, in his introduction to the book: “in encountering these poems and becoming conversant with them, I have felt a grim energy verging on elation. Does this belie the burden of Celan’s voice, or is elation akin to something the poet knew?” There’s so much here: the experience of translating Celan, the hope that in translating Celan’s poems he felt something akin to what Celan felt writing them, and the concern that his elation was somehow a betrayal, inappropriate to Celan’s struggle to voice his grim feelings.
Felstiner’s burden was a heavy one, and he clearly worried that he was not bringing all he could over into English. He said in his ALTA talk, “Celan’s language was German, the mother tongue which for Celan also became the murderers’ tongue. When the only thing he had left — no parents, no homeland, no culture, no family
— was his mother tongue, then the alienation that occurs when I
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