Having been denied the opportunity to perform the common rituals surrounding death for those he lost in the Shoah, I argue that Celan makes burial possible through a particular use of language, a praxis of poetic burial as I call it, which acquires the status of funerary rite. As we see in early poems such as “Espenbaum/Aspen Tree” (1945) the presence of the mother figure lies silently beneath the surface of every tree, flower, cloud and star; every aspect of the natural world is laden with her being, which serves as a vessel in which the presence of his mother is contained. Reconstituted almost entirely from the memory of words, affects and scenes connected to home, his mother and the Bukovinian/Ukrainian landscape, Celan’s early poems function as a receptacle in which the presence of the dead is contained.
This use of language fashions pieces of memory -- place, word and sound -- into poems that like a grave, demarcate the prior existence of a person, a people, indeed an entire world “in which human beings and books used to live” (Celan 1958). Poetry is here, in other words, a means of burying the dead. Celan makes burial possible not only by remembering the place the dead occupied in life but goes one step further to retroactively create a place for them in death, an ancient and essential rite that was denied them. His early poetry in this sense forges a grave – by making a tomb in and from writing for those he lost, and thus poetically conferring the dignity of burial to those from whom it was taken.
Keren Shafir, Keren Shafir, PhD candidate and fellow of the Ariane de Rothschild Women Doctoral Program at Tel Aviv University.
Aspen Tree by Paul Celan, translated into English by Michael Hamburger in Poems of Paul Celan. New York: Persea, 2002 Aspen Tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair was never white.
Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My yellow-haired mother did not come home.
Rain cloud, above the well do you hover? My quiet mother weeps for everyone.
Round star, you wind the golden loop.
My mother's heart was ripped by lead.
Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges? My gentle mother cannot return.