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If a process of creative reading for translation has informed the writing of the translated poem, there is hope its readers will be able to engage in a similar way with the poem before them. Furthermore, creative reading of the translated text means that the reader is aware there was an original that gave rise to it. To make such awareness more likely, background for the original poem needs to be supplied so that the new readers’ cognitive context contains at least some elements that were likely to have formed part of the cognitive context of the original readers. I can only indicate here one or two such places in the translated poem where considerations of the creative engagement possible for new readers have been particularly important. There are of course instances, in the translation, of sound repetition and ambiguity that attempt to convey some of the obsessiveness and slipperiness of the original. Words such as “waking … playing”, “lie … righted”, “unsaid … heads” are in part chosen with a view to repeated sound. But much more important are the points of ambiguity in the poem that might lead to explorations of language itself. The words “righted”, “crown”, “pickings” and “glint” will serve to illustrate some of this ambiguity and the creatively engaged reading to which it is hoped they can give rise.

“Righted” in line 3 was chosen because the word needs to express the result of an action that has placed the corpses upright. “To right” is normally “to restore to an upright position”, as in “he righted the vase that had fallen over”. But “to right” also means “to put right”, and thus “righted” has connotations of being morally upright, which perhaps they were not, but which they were assumed by the rest of society to be, or had been placed so as to appear to be, and which in the speaker’s mind they may appear to be in contrast to his own inability to act.

“Crown” was chosen for “Prunk” in line 5, because, as noted under point (3) above, “Prunk” is something ostentatious, suggesting embellishment, and the word is etymologically related to verbs meaning “to shine”. But a crown is also the top of a tree in German (Baumkrone), and the corpses are explicitly addressed as trees in line 4. There are further connotations of the crown of thorns, especially given the contrast to “Bettel” (that which a beggar has collected). The crown is an extremely potent image in Judaism, where, in the Kabbalistic symbolism that exerted great influence on Celan (cf. Felstiner 1995: 235–241), it is at the top of the tree that symbolises the sefirot, or manifestations of God (Scholem 1971: 44; 70). Thorns are symbols of uncultured land, as well as of trial and difficulty, in both Jewish and Christian traditions (see Gheerbrandt et al. 1996: 262, 991) and the image of the crown of thorns drew on both these symbols. In Celan’s other poetry, images of a crown, and of thorns, often in juxtaposition with images of blood, are common. “Prunk” is related to “Pranger”, a pillory, a pillar or stocks, or whipping post, used for public humiliation of criminals. “Prunk” thus suggests in German not only the embellishments of office but also (though this etymological connection would not be known to most German readers) the need for public acknowledgement of crimes, and is thus, in the original poem, linked by its connotations both to “die Axt an etwas legen”, literally “to take an axe to something”, and to “aufgerichtet”, a connotation possibly stronger in the English “righted”.

“Pickings” was used in line 6 for “Bettel”, literally, “that which a beggar has collected”. In conjunction with axes, it may for the English reader have the connotations of picks as working tools, as “Äxten” certainly would have had for Celan, not least because his parents were made to work as stone quarriers in the slave-labour camp in the Ukraine where they died.

“Glint” is used in the final line for “blinken”. Originally meaning “to look askance, let one’s glance slide off”, it is related to “glance” and “glide” in English, and to similar words in French and Dutch. Like “blinken”, it picks up the sense of “prangen” (to shine) that linguistically lies behind “Prunk”, and is semantically (though not of course etymologically) connected to “crown”. There is an ambiguity about “glint”, especially because of its original meaning, “to let one’s glance slide off” something, as suggested by an etymology which links it to “blink” in English (see Onions et al. 1966: 401), the closest obvious equivalent of “blinken” in German, a word that appears in the final line. That connotation of a sliding glance is still present in our knowledge of words such as “glisser”, “to slip” in French, the root of many technical terms in sports such as skiing and climbing. “Glint” may thus suggest, as many of Celan’s poems do, the need to look at things indirectly, to let our glance slide off them. Another example is “Auge der Zeit” (Time’s Eye) from the same collection (Celan 1982: 51). In this poem, though, indirect looking is not just a way of preserving one’s sanity in the face of traumatic events. It is also a source of guilt: if we do not look at things directly we are merely “playing” with axes but not actually setting to work with them. “Glint” in English probably has connotations of gleaming, of embellishment, or of a sudden hint or suggestion, more than of “glance”. However, many words hold connotations in their sound (cf. Andersen 1998), a fact which may or may not be related to their etymology. “Glint” is part of a series of words “hint”, “squint”, “tint” that all suggest something fleeting and subtle.

The English translation, it is hoped, will allow engaged reading that considers the links between words in the poem and words suggested, and the ambiguities of thought to which particular words such as “righted” give rise, as well as the force of the poetic images. But the translation should also allow the reader to be aware of the original poem that lies behind it. This might simply be an awareness that it exists, that the English poem is a re-telling, or it may go beyond this to consider links between English and German that were already in the original, such as some of those mentioned above. The degree of awareness of the original poem does not depend on the reader’s knowledge of the source language, but much more on such things as the presentation of the translated poem (monolingually or bilingually, for example), or discussion of translation in the book in which the poem appears, for example in a Translator’s Preface.