Du Bouchet conveyed his surprise to us in a striking reappraisal of the matter: “Yes, [something rotten] in [Hölderlin’s] work, which among all others appeals to purity as an absolute.” In the face of this incredible situation, du Bouchet was driven to re-imagine and reconfirm his own testimony: “I repeat, and word for word, the distressing sentence, at the time incomprehensible, yet uttered quite calmly.” Celan dispelled any misunderstanding. Du Bouchet {333|334} reports the incident in a slightly grandiose fashion, and his writing reflects his horror. He would have preferred not to have had such an experience, provoked by just a few words. He was shattered.

I took some of the courses taught by Jean Wahl during the years preceding du Bouchet’s return from America in August 1948, and du Bouchet took the same courses later on. Wahl’s courses were more open and appealing than others, as he did not address himself exclusively to a university audience; there was a lot of discussion of “metaphysical poetry.” Later, there were lectures at the Collège de Philosophie in St. Germain-des-Prés, which were just as popular. Heidegger {335|336} was very much on the scene, despite the reservations he aroused. The intellectual climate makes one suppose that the setting adopted by the poet was not so much endured as chosen.

Celan loathed this world. Clearly, he had studied it closely when the occasion required, but he did not glorify it; on the contrary. Hölderlin did not figure among the writers with whom he was really associated—the canon is not very broad. Hölderlin was too “hymnic,” too Greek and too Germanic; he was invoked at an inauspicious time, against the times. Du Bouchet had only to recognize Celan’s allusion to the Wannsee conference, where in early 1942 the Nazis decided on the extermination of the Jews, as a reference in the word “January” (“Jänner”) in the poem’s title. Basically, du Bouchet’s account of his astonishment re-opens the whole field in which the truth had already found its means of expression.

The meaning inscribed in the words may hide from the light, but it can still be uncovered. Not the poetry but the discourse surrounding it has carried it into another world. The quotation from Hölderlin recovers this transferred meaning: ce qui est pur jaillissement (the “purely originated”) is an enigma, according to du Bouchet’s translation; “pure” is, for Celan, “without stain” and without compromise. The eyes have their memory, which corrects—their own memory (this is repeated). “Hölderlin’s towers” are in the water, given over to a conscious re-reading of the event. The seagulls do not add a merely descriptive element: the word “gull” (mouette) has more to say; it is a signifier.

“Visits of drowning joiners” in stanza 2: in this context, should one not say that they are all “drowned”? All the witnesses are dead, and by the same token their reception has lost its meaning, if we understand the prophetic speech (uttered in stanza 3). The prophecy from beyond the grave is formulated by the camps’ victims. For a “man” (the German word Mensch doubtless has a Yiddish intonation) considering “this time” (heute, “today”), there would no longer be any language at all. A Talmudist, a prisoner of his ancestral customs, was there, in this delirium, the Hölderlin of madness. He would have spoken the truth by shaping the unspeakable.

If we want to translate the opening of “Tübingen, January,” we have to take into account the sense that the word “eye” assumes in Celan’s poetry. It has an idiomatic meaning: it represents an agency that follows and observes the writing, controlling the enigma and the process of re-semanticization. Du Bouchet translates it as pupilles, rather than yeux (“eyes”). Might his own blindness be a factor here? It is here, after all, that the false is obliged to tell the truth, by betraying itself. To recognize this betrayal, it is important to distinguish between ordinary discourse, “talking” (Rede, stanza 1), and poetic language, “speaking” (Sprache, stanza 3). The false subject does not lend itself very well to the principles to which du Bouchet adheres. His translation neutralizes and {338|339} ignores the verdict that strikes what is called “persuasion,” as when it was imposed in the intense celebration of Hölderlin beginning around 1900. It left in place all the wrong ideas that perpetuated repression.

We hear Celan talking to his friend, the French translator of his poems. Those people in Germany have laid claim to an impenetrable origin, ancient and modern; they have texts they can refer to. But these are talmi (counterfeit), these unequivocally initiatory but spurious compositions. What we must fight against now was already a “fake.” That is how we should read the whole poem, written by Celan in 1961 and included in Die Niemandsrose (The No One’s Rose) in1963. The “drowned joiners” are numerous; a whole crowd of them got together in Hölderlin’s tower. The joiner Zimmer, the host responsible for his poet lodger, had a clear vision of this delirium. It was a madness that spoke the truth. The ancestral tradition, guarantor of humanization, if one needed to claim it in opposition to Hölderlin’s devotees, should not be sought in Greece, nor in Christianity. But the other, Jewish tradition, which “speaks,” no longer exists. It is dead in today’s world, in “this time” (it is not telle époque [“such a time”], as du Bouchet would have it). If we were to make this past speak, it would be merely a babbling, in keeping with the words uttered by the madman.

It is not enough to say that the plural (“joiners”) is confused with “Hölderlin’s visitors,” who existed and were known to him and to us (Jallet 2006:189). The reverse is more accurate. The protectors of a longstanding demand in poetry will be the visitors to the disaster; they are all dead (“drowned in poetry”); they rush to hear the message. Celan had already told his friend du Bouchet, without addressing him directly, what he needed to know.

Jallet is right to insist on the demonstrative adjectives, correcting du Bouchet. The visitors, in their funereal domain, are drawn by “these … words” (diesen … Worten); in the second stanza, they announce the intractable statement of the third, which concerns “this time” (spräch er von dieser Zeit). But this is {340|341} not syllabic babble, which would be the only appropriate language. We have to include an intermediary position: if the “just” of the Talmud, perpetuating the tradition of the fathers of the Torah, were concerned with defining what had occurred, their knowledge would be unproductive; they would end up with an iteration that closes up into an unintelligible and incommunicable language. This is what the poet in his madness must have known. We have to conclude that the wisdom of the tzaddiks (righteous men) is obsolete, that a tradition is dead. One can no longer create a poem without knowing that, and without speaking of its loss, as Celan did. It is not only the Greeks and Hölderlin who are mute; one can no longer lay claim to the Jewish tradition either. Celan does not do that; he contradicts and corrupts a poetic tradition to protect himself from corruption.

No doubt du Bouchet could not see that in his translation he only half-filled in the gulf or the abyss that the philosopher opened up. The “monstrous” appears. Du Bouchet is Heideggerizing. The driver (a student who is present during the conversation) hears what is said; Celan attributes to him the role of witness, an objective “third party” (stanza 7). What is said is remembered; lui-même à son écoute (“he himself listening”) does not convey that. It should be entendre dire (“hearing [what is] said”). The translation, as is so often the case, is too refined; it misses a simpler rendering that would maintain the precision. Questing too deeply into language makes the meaning disappear. The driver hears what is said; he is charged with preserving memory and with transmitting it to the future.

One might go further, moving away from the meaning of the texts but approaching instead du Bouchet’s conception of the language of poetry. What could be better than all these books, a whole library (we understand the importance of the plural that he introduces), and the whole culture, a receptacle of all the chance currents of history? The line break certainly raises this question. They left the cottage, getting back to a less absolute “outside.” The “along the way” expresses the whole truth. The visit was nothing but a whim on Celan’s part, a place where “he wanted to go one day,” on impulse or out of envy. Du Bouchet’s reading becomes clear. What Celan hears the other person say in the car would be remarks about the pine trees, about the great moments revealed by a truer nature, between fire and water. Du Bouchet situates the “appearances” against a background of absence. He provides a reading independent of words that rehabilitates Heidegger, leads back to himself and at the same time to his own aesthetics.

André du Bouchet often sent my wife and me signed copies of his publications. He regularly informed me of his interest in mine. These are beautiful letters. I cannot remember all that I sent him—probably several of my interpretations of Celan. He read them with inevitably contradictory feelings, opening himself to them, questioning them and defending himself; in 1992, when he sent us Axiales, he wrote: “in true agreement, disagreement and friendship”; in 1994, for Carnet, he wrote: “the thick layers of time sometimes crossed / with my friendly regards”; this was a step in a precise direction. Then, going much further in 1996 {344|345} (Pourquoi si calmes): “in admiration of his exegesis and the incessant advance of meaning / their friend.” It is in this book that we find the reflection “Autour du mot la neige est réunie” (“Snow is gathered around the word”), a return to Celan’s language that I probably helped to bring about.

Du Bouchet was surely shaken by my discussion of “The Mountain of Death.” He wrote to me on April 17, 1997:

The repetition of the word “syntax” may seem surprising. It is the tool of clarification. According to du Bouchet, the poet “usually” cares nothing about it. In the end the argumentation remains dogmatic. My own reading renews and changes the data, but it is as if the newness is proof above all of the resources of language, transcending still more, in the composed work, all the obsessions, and as if the process would otherwise have to be challenged.

One evening when Celan was accompanying me (here again I know where: we were walking along the quays on the way home from a talk at the Goethe Institute on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris), he said—just like that, without any context—that the vocabulary of du Bouchet, whose work he was translating or had translated (Vakante Glut / Dans la chaleur vacante was published in 1968), was limited. He was unquestionably implying that du Bouchet should have moved beyond the restrictions or the asceticism he had imposed upon himself. A different outside demanded words other than those devoured by the empty spaces on the page. Du Bouchet was to be found in his empty spaces; Celan discovered in these same spaces a whole literary tradition, an expressive force that was not, after all, unique to du Bouchet. {345|346}

At the closing session of the colloquium dedicated to Celan’s work at the Maison des Écrivains in 1995, du Bouchet came to read his translation of “The Meridian.” He knew that other translations had been produced in the interim, and he had not revised his text. He read it very deliberately, like a document written by him and in his language. He delivered it just as it was, like something that had been important in his life at one time. In this gesture, as elsewhere, there was both obstinacy and a natural honesty.

For du Bouchet, poetry formed a truth, much as the heritage of past thinkers concerns philosophers. He included certain authors and excluded others. Celan proceeded in the same way, to some extent, but the split was not cultural: it was based on a conscious decision; it was more radical. In short, there was no poetry but his own. Different from others’, his was both personal and definable; it had its own criteria. The rejections were not implicit, nor were the (less common) alliances. It was thus a constitutively positive relationship to a whole literary tradition that led du Bouchet almost spontaneously to include Celan, out of admiration and friendship but also necessity, in the circle he set up for himself. These choices are cultural, or perhaps aesthetic. Celan isolates himself, he separates himself more than he seeks himself, otherwise he would be less subversive. The “person” he speaks about in his reflections precedes any entry into language—whether, if one adopts du Bouchet’s point of view, it be that of a Baudelaire or a Reverdy (Mallarmé, overly autonomous, is obviously exempt). Du Bouchet allows himself to be guided by his philosophical concepts, almost by a system. Nothingness will no longer be the same; it is, as it were, embodied.

The position of the adversary is constructed with words drawn from Celan’s poems, which du Bouchet listens to again in his own way, reinterprets, and transposes. The references take little or no notice of their original context; to this extent, they remain indeterminate in an absence of meaning.

Languages are obviously situated within the limits of the human, almost superhuman, mission. One needs “teeth.” Du Bouchet re-translates; he escapes the impasse and finds the “bite … of the elementary.” The displacement allows him to reconsolidate the powers of the outside as action taking place inside, close to language. The terrible is removed and installed elsewhere; it has infinitely more sovereignty than history: “Not a word can be placed on it” (12, 17). From this one has to deduce that “to the terrible, which is the subject of Paul Celan’s poetry, it [that poetry] will not have returned, strictly speaking” (13, 1–2). The last words drive in the nail; they describe in positive terms the system as du Bouchet conceives it. The misunderstanding is not, cannot be, specified; there is a basic incompatibility between two poetic pursuits that will never see eye to eye. These remarks are merely details. Another’s word—an opinion—is transformed into a retort, a blunt rejection. Celan’s “terrible” basically repudiates the real terror that nourishes poetry, in du Bouchet’s view. Thus du Bouchet tries to explicate the most intimate experiences produced by writing (see the progression in the description or successive definitions of negativity [13, 2–6]). Moving forward in the exploration of the “unknown elementary components” (13, 18), he considers that he has taken “a step outside the human” (in italics in the text, 13, 20–21). Does he think he has encountered Celan’s strangeness, when Celan has alienated himself in order to break free from discourse-obstacles? The “step” for du Bouchet reveals an internal and integrated antecedence, an absolute anteriority in speech. He communicates an experiment he purports to have carried out on language.

A logic follows its course. How can a great poet not be affected by a system whose power another poet has felt? Should the system not be re-integrated at all costs, instead of being assimilated, when it is a question of poetry itself, of its practice? {349|}