Opak: Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans 'Meridian' und im Gedicht 'Schwanengefahr' by Chiara Caradonna (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Opak: Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans 'Meridian' und im Gedicht 'Schwanengefahr' by Chiara Caradonna Marko Pajević Opak: Schatten der Erkenntnis in Paul Celans 'Meridian' und im Gedicht 'Schwanengefahr'. By Chiara Caradonna. Göttingen: Wallstein. 2020. 455 pp. €48. ISBN 978–3–8353–3508–0. This voluminous and profoundly philosophical study focuses on a single short poem by Paul Celan, 'Schwanengefahr'. Chiara Caradonna's point of departure is the poem itself and an equally short comment on it by Celan in a letter to his friend, Franz Wurm. After a few pages of initial reflections on Celan's approach to writing poetry, particularly his method of combining various aspects 'all in one' ('in Eins'), Caradonna delves at great length into Celan's poetological speech, 'The Meridian', and the preparatory notes he made for it. Drawing also on related archival materials, she embarks on a thorough exploration of a key element of Celan's poetics: the issue of light and darkness and the related notions of shadow and opacity. Caradonna digs deep into all the references the enormous Celan scholarship has discovered, managing to bring them all together and to add a good number of enriching elements and ideas: Pascal, Shestov, Lenz, Kafka, Berdyaev, Valéry, Benn, Scheler, Bühler, Heidegger, Husserl, Becker, and many more are all discussed in considerable detail and their influence on Celan's work illuminated. Caradonna masters not only German, French, English and Italian sources, but works also with Hebrew (she lectures in Jerusalem) as well as Russian. This alone is a very considerable achievement, proof of highly impressive scholarship and an intellectual grasp of the issues at stake for Celan and his readership. In her in-depth treatment of the question of obscurity in Celan's poetics, which developed from the traditional light–darkness dichotomy towards an advocation of poetry's particular opacity in the face of a totalizing form of light, Caradonna alights on a wealth of relevant issues for Celan Studies and provides a general reflection on what his poems do, or can do. The study demonstrates convincingly what a philosophically minded and informed poet Celan was, with a particular [End Page 171] focus on the phenomenological imprints in his poetics. It offers tremendous foundational work demonstrating that his opacity is far from being 'hermetic', as used to be stated so often. References are also made to other poets, such as Whitman, and of course to other poems in Celan's notably close-knit œuvre. The final ninety pages of the book return to 'Schwanengefahr', examining its genesis in detail. This 1967 poem belongs to the late phase of Celan's writing, when his poems became very condensed and indeed enigmatic, which is why few scholars have ventured to analyse them in depth, making the contribution of the present book all the more valuable: until now, only one study had proposed a closer reading of this poem. Caradonna for her part deserves praise, not least for establishing that a text by the anthropologist Éveline Lot-Falck provided important cues for Celan without which it would be almost impossible to understand some of the poem's key references. Thus, the constructing principle of many of Celan's poems, particularly the later ones, is once again revealed in a manner which is both very enlightening and impressively erudite. The book contains an index of names and a bibliography of fourteen pages, of which, however, only two are devoted to Celan-specific secondary literature. While it is evidently difficult in the case of intensely studied authors such as Celan to take into consideration all that has been written, greater reference might have been made to the secondary literature that deals with some of the points which Caradonna develops. Moreover, in a study that speaks about the limits of a classical hermeneutic approach and relies very much on background knowledge and context to interpret the poem, there is hardly any mention of the particular poetic form of 'Schwanengefahr'. I would have preferred to see a conclusion that managed to wrap up and formulate the key insights of Caradonna's great intellectual endeavour. In its stead we are offered a long quotation from Benjamin...