Felstiner also felt something else: “a strange sense of having authored the lines I am speaking.” And so when he looks back at the Spanish original, he is “astonished to find that somehow it now sounds like an uncannily good translation of my own poem, with perhaps a few odd spots.”* And when at his Yale talk someone in the audience referred to the Celan original as “the German version,” Felstiner responded half-seriously, “Sometimes I think of it as a strangely timewarped version of my own translation.”
Felstiner’s relationship with Celan is not only with him but also with all the loss Celan felt and with the way that he expressed that loss. There is also Felstiner’s own feeling of loss, what the Holocaust means to him personally. Every translator is nagged by what he cannot preserve, but in translating a poetry of loss, any further loss is agonizing. Felstiner felt an obligation to learn everything he could about Celan so that there would be as little loss as possible. At the same time, he was drawn to and excited by this search and by the attempt to capture not only what any translator strives for, but more and deeper and with complete knowledge of what he is doing, and what he is not able to do.
Affinity, devotion, redemption — these sorts of submission give us some of our best, most passionate translations. And they do this by bringing the translator into an exceptionally intimate relationship with the original work of art. Even if Felstiner had written a critical biography of Celan, he could not have become nearly as intimate with Celan’s work—and thus the man—as he did by translating him.
Paul Blackburn, an American poet of the 50s and 60s, said it nice and directly: “I don’t become the author when I’m translating his prose or poetry, but I’m certainly getting my talents into his hang-ups. Another person’s preoccupations are occupying me. They literally own me for that time. . . . In a way you live [the text] each time, I mean, you’re there. Otherwise, you’re not holding the poem.”*
“Holding the poem.” The way you’d hold a lover. Putting up with hang-ups, living together. Except with a lover, you share each other’s hang-ups, and when you hold you get held back. The translator can have this experience only when there is mutual translation. Usually it’s a one-way experience, a one-way intimacy.
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