translate him is an extra turn of the screw, it seems to me, a loss.” And at Yale he noted about a particular translation decision, “I was trying to redeem the loss a little bit.”
Felstiner’s relationship with Celan can also be inferred from what he says about Celan’s relationships with the authors he translated, particularly William Shakespeare and Osip Mandelshtam. “Celan translated Mandelshtam like a long lost blood brother, although he never met him,” Felstiner said in his ALTA talk. “Many things occasioned this ‘shock of recognition’ (Melville’s phrase) in Celan. Mandelshtam . . . had worked as a translator and had once attempted suicide. Each grew up close to his mother and because of his father harbored ambivalence toward Judaism. Both underwent political and literary persecution not unrelated to their origins. . . . The alienation Celan shared with Mandelshtam and Kafka made them into alter egos. The Russian poet, he once said, offered ‘what is brotherly—in the most reverential sense I can give that word. . . . I consider translating Mandelshtam into German to be as important a task as my own verses.’”
“During his time of psychic distress,” Felstiner wrote, “Celan translated the author he most esteemed. . . . He began learning English so as to read Shakespeare, tried some sonnet translations, and at eighteen in England went to see the plays performed. . . . When the Germans invaded in 1941, he recited his Shakespeare translations in the Czernowitz ghetto, I’m told, and during his months at forced labor carried a notebook containing his version of sonnet 57.”*
I think it would be going too far to say that Felstiner sees Celan as a brother or alter ego. But it isn’t the type of relationship that’s important; it is much more the “shock of recognition,” sharing a feeling of alienation, of tragedy, of psychic distress. In fact, it’s the activity of sharing, identifying, empathizing that is most important. Translation, like any relationship, is a process, a getting closer, a learning more, a doing things together, a worrying about, a growing love.
Love and devotion do not, however, necessitate reverence. Celan, for one, molded the poetry of his favorite writers to fit his reactions to their work. “In Celan’s twenty-one sonnet translations,” Felstiner wrote, “Shakespeare suffers a sea change into something
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