In the Midst of Losses

Paul Antschel was born in 1920 in Czernowitz in the territory of Buko-vina, which after the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 had become part of Romania. Czernowitz was in those days an intellectually lively city with a sizable minority of German-speaking Jews. Antschel was brought up speaking High German; his education, partly in German, partly in Romanian, included a spell in a Hebrew school. As a youth he wrote verse, revered Rilke.

After a year (1938–1939) at medical school in France, where he encountered the Surrealists, he came home on vacation and was trapped there by the outbreak of war. Under the Hitler– Stalin pact Bukovina was absorbed into the Ukraine: for a brief while he was a Soviet subject.

In June of 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR. The Jews of Czernowitz were driven into a ghetto; soon the deportations commenced. Apparently forewarned, Antschel sought hiding the night his parents were taken. The parents were shipped to labor camps in occupied Ukraine, where both died, his mother by a bullet to the head when she became unfit for work. Antschel himself spent the war years doing forced labor in Axis Romania.

Liberated by the Russians in 1944, he worked for a while as an aide in a psychiatric hospital, then in Bucharest as an editor and translator, adopting the pen name Celan, an anagram of Antschel in its Romanian spelling. In 1947, before Stalin’s iron curtain came down, he slipped away to Vienna and from there to Paris. In Paris he passed his examinations for the Licence ès Lettres and was appointed lecturer in German literature at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, a position he held until his death. He married a Frenchwoman, a Catholic from an aristocratic background.

The success of this move from East to West was soon marred. Among the writers Celan had been translating was the French poet Yvan Goll (1891– 1950). Goll’s widow Claire took issue with Celan over his versions, and went on to accuse him publicly of plagiarizing certain of Goll’s German poems. Though the accusations were malicious and perhaps even crazy, Celan brooded over them to the point of convincing himself that Claire Goll was part of a conspiracy against him. “What must we Jews yet endure?” he wrote to his confidante Nelly Sachs, like him a Jew writing in German. “You have no idea how many should be counted among the base, no Nelly Sachs, you have no idea!… Should I name names? You would stiffen with horror.”

His reaction cannot just be put down to paranoia. As postwar Germany began to feel more confident, anti-Semitic currents were again beginning to flow, not only on the right but, more disturbingly, on the left. Celan sensed, not without reason, that he had become a convenient focus for the campaign for the Aryanization of German culture that had not given up in 1945, merely gone underground.

Claire Goll never relented in her campaign against Celan, pursuing him even beyond the grave; her persecutions poisoned his days and contributed heavily to his eventual breakdown.

Between 1938 and his death in 1970 Celan wrote some eight hundred po ems in German; in addition there is a body of early work in Romanian. Recognition of his gifts came soon, with the publication of Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory) in 1952. He consolidated his reputation as one of the more important young German-language poets with Sprachgitter (Speech Grille, 1959) and Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s Rose, 1963). Two more volumes appeared during his lifetime, and three posthumously. This later poetry, out of phase with the leftward swing of the German intelligentsia after 1968, was not quite so enthusiastically received.

By the standards of international modernism, Celan’s work up to 1963 is quite accessible. The later poetry, however, becomes strikingly difficult, even obscure. Balked by what they took to be arcane symbolism and private references, reviewers called the later Celan hermetic. It was a label he vehemently rejected. “Not in the least hermetic,” he said. “Read! Just keep reading, understanding comes of itself.”

Typical of the “hermetic” Celan is the following posthumously published poem, which I give in John Felstiner’s translation:

You lie amid a great listening,
enbushed, enflaked.

Go to the Spree, to the Havel,
go to the meathooks,
the red apple stakes
from Sweden—

Here comes the gift table,
it turns around an Eden—

The man became a sieve, the Frau,
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for no one, for everyone—

The Landwehr Canal won’t make a murmur.
Nothing
stops.

What, at the most elementary level, is this poem about? Hard to say, until one becomes privy to certain information, information supplied by Celan to the critic Peter Szondi. The man who became a sieve is Karl Liebknecht, “the Frau…the sow” swimming in the canal is Rosa Luxemburg. “Eden” is the name of an apartment block built on the site where the two activists were shot in 1919, while the meathooks are the hooks at Plötzensee on the Havel River on which the would-be assassins of Hitler in 1944 were hanged. In the light of this information, the poem emerges as a pessimistic comment on the continuity of right-wing murderousness in Germany, and the silence of Germans about it.

The Rosa Luxemburg poem became a minor locus classicus when the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, defending Celan against charges of obscurity, gave a reading of it through which he argued that any receptive, open-minded reader with a German cultural background can understand what it is important to understand in Celan without assistance, that background information should take second place to “what the poem [itself] knows.”¹

Gadamer’s argument is a brave but losing one. What he forgets is that we cannot be sure that the information that unlocks the poem—in this case, the identities of the dead man and woman—is of secondary importance until we know what it is. Yet the questions Gadamer raises are important ones. Does poetry offer a kind of knowledge different from that offered by history, and demand a different kind of receptivity? Is it possible to respond to poetry like Celan’s, even to translate it, without fully understanding it?

Michael Hamburger, one of the most eminent of Celan’s translators, seems to think so. Though scholars have certainly illumined Celan’s poetry for him, Hamburger says, he is not sure he “understands,” in the normal sense of the word, even those poems he has translated, or all of them.

“[It] asks too much of the reader,” is the verdict of Felstiner on the Rosa Luxemburg poem. But, he continues, “what is too much, given this history?” This, in a nutshell, is Felstiner’s own response to accusations of hermeticism against Celan. Given the enormity of anti-Semitic persecutions in the twentieth century, given the all-too-human need of Germans, and of the Christian West in general, to escape from a monstrous historical incubus, we can ask what memory, what knowledge is it too much to demand? Even if Celan’s poems were totally incomprehensible (this is not something that Felstiner says, but it is a valid extrapolation), they would nevertheless stand in our way like a tomb, a tomb built by a “Poet, Survivor, Jew” (the subtitle of Felstiner’s recent study), insisting by its looming presence that we remember, even though the words inscribed on it may seem to belong to an undecipherable tongue.

At stake is more than a simple confrontation between a Germany impatient to forget its past and a Jewish poet insisting on reminding Germany of that past. Celan was made famous by, and is still most widely known for, the poem “Death Fugue”:

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margerete
your ashen hair Shulamith

(I quote from the last part of Hamburger’s translation because Felstiner’s version of the passage, quite as strong in its own way, is controversial out of context.) “Death Fugue” was Celan’s first published poem: it was composed in 1944 or 1945 and first appeared, in Romanian translation, in 1947. It absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing. It is not entirely Celan’s brainchild: here and there he takes over phrases, among them “Death is a master from Germany,” from fellow poets of his Czernowitz days. Nevertheless, its impact is immediate and universal. “Death Fugue” is one of the landmark poems of the twentieth century.

“Death Fugue” has been widely read in the German-speaking world, anthologized, studied in schools, as part a program of what is called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with, or overcoming, the past. At the public readings Celan gave in Germany, “Death Fugue” was always in demand. It is the most direct of Celan’s poems in naming and blaming: naming what went on in the death camps, blaming Germany. Some of Celan’s defenders argue that he is labeled “difficult” only because readers find the encounter with him too emotionally bruising. It is an argument that needs to account for the reception of “Death Fugue,” a reception with (apparently) open arms.

In fact, Celan himself never trusted the spirit in which he was welcomed and even fêted in West Germany. In the line that German critics took with “Death Fugue”—to quote one eminent critic, that it showed he had escaped “history’s bloody chamber of horrors to rise into the ether of pure poetry”—he sensed that he was being misinterpreted, and, in the deepest historical sense, willfully misinterpreted. Nor was he pleased to hear that in the classroom German students were being directed to ignore the content of the poem and concentrate on its form, particularly its imitation of fugal structure.

When Celan writes in this poem of the “ashen hair” of Shulamith, he is invoking the hair of Jews that fell as ash on the Silesian countryside; when he writes of “the sow” bobbing in the waters of the Landswehr Canal, he is referring, in the voice of one of her murderers, to the body of a dead Jewish woman. Against pressure to claim him as a poet who had turned the Holocaust into something higher, namely poetry, against the critical orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its view of the ideal poem as a self-enclosed aesthetic object, Celan insists that he practices an art of the real, an art that “does not transfigure or render ‘poetical’; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible.”

With its repetitive, hammering music, “Death Fugue” is as direct as verse can be in its approach to its subject. It also makes two huge implicit claims about what poetry in our time is, or should be, capable of. One is that language can measure up to any subject whatever: however unspeakable the Holocaust may be, there is a poetry that can speak it. The other is that the German language in particular, corrupted to the bone during the Nazi era by euphemism and a kind of leering doublespeak, is capable of telling the truth about Germany’s immediate past.

The first claim was dramatically rejected in Theodor Adorno’s pronouncement, issued in 1949 and reiterated in 1965, that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno might have added: doubly barbaric to write poems in German. (Adorno took back his words, grudgingly, in 1966, perhaps as a concession to “Death Fugue.”)

Celan avoids the word “Holocaust” in his writing, as he avoided all usages that might seem to imply that everyday language is in a position to name, and thereby limit and master, that toward which it gestures. Celan gave two major public addresses during his lifetime, both acceptance speeches for prizes, in which, with great scrupulousness of word choice, he responded to doubts about the future of poetry. In the first address, in 1958, he spoke of his halting faith that language, even the German language, had survived “that which happened” under the Nazis:

There remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language.
It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.

Coming from a Jew, such an expression of faith in German might seem odd. Yet Celan was by no means alone: even after 1945, numbers of Jews continued to claim the German language and intellectual tradition as their own. Among them was Martin Buber. Celan paid a visit to the aged Buber to ask Buber’s counsel about continuing to write in German. Buber’s response—that it was only natural to write in one’s mother tongue, that one should take a forgiving stance toward the German—disappointed him. As Felstiner puts it, “Celan’s vital need, to hear some echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp.”² His plight was that if German was “his” language, it was his only in a complex, contested, and painful way.

In Bucharest, Celan had improved his Russian and translated Lermontov and Chekhov into Romanian. In Paris he continued to translate Russian poetry, finding in the Russian language a welcome, counter-Germanic home. In particular he read Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) intensively. In Mandelstam he met not only a man whose life story corresponded in what he thought were uncanny ways to his own, but a ghostly interlocutor who responded to his deepest needs, who offered, in Celan’s words, “what is brotherly—in the most reverential sense I can give that word.”

Setting his own creative work aside, Celan spent most of 1958 and 1959 translating Mandelstam into German. His versions constitute an extraordinary act of inhabiting another poet, though Nadezhda Mandelstam, Mandelstam’s widow, is right to call them “a very far cry from the original text.”

Mandelstam’s notion of poem as dialogue did much to reshape Celan’s own poetic theory. Celan’s poems begin to address a Thou who may be more or less distant, more or less known. In the space between the speaking I and the Thou they find a new field of tension.

(I know you, you’re the one bent over low,
and I, the one pierced through, am in your need.
Where flames a word to witness for us both?
You—wholly real. I—wholly mad.)

(This is Felstiner’s translation. In the freer version by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov, the last line reads: “You’re my reality. I’m your mirage.”)

2.

If there is one theme dominating Felstiner’s biography of Celan, it is that Celan developed from being a German poet whose fate it was to be a Jew to being a Jewish poet whose fate it was to write in German; that he outgrew kinship with Rilke and Heidegger, to find in Kafka and Mandelstam his true spiritual forebears. Though Celan continued during the 1960s to visit Germany to give readings, any hope that he might develop an emotional involvement with re-arisen Germany faded, to the point that he called it a “most tragic and indeed most childish error.” He began to read Gershom Scholem on the Jewish mystical tradition, Buber on Hasidism. Hebrew words—Ziv, the unearthly light of God’s presence; Yizkor, memory—appeared in his poetry. The theme of testifying, witnessing, came to the fore, along with the bitter personal subtheme: “No one/bears witness for the/witness.” The “Thou” of his insistently dialogical poetry became, intermittently but unmistakably, God; echoes emerged of the Kabbalistic teaching that the whole of creation is a text in the divine language.

The capture of Jerusalem by Israeli forces in the 1967 war overjoyed Celan. He wrote a celebratory poem that was widely read in Israel:

Just think: your
own hand
has held
this piece of
habitable earth,
again suffered
up into life.

In 1969 Celan visited Israel for the first time (“So many Jews, only Jews, and not in a ghetto,” he marveled ironically). He gave talks and readings, met Israeli writers, resumed a romantic relationship with a woman from his Czernowitz days.

As a child Celan had for three years gone to a Hebrew school. Though he studied the language unwillingly (he associated it with his Zionist father rather than his beloved Germanophile mother), his command of it ran surprisingly deep. Aharon Appelfeld, by then an Israeli but by origin a Czernowitzer like Celan, found Celan’s Hebrew “rather good.” When Yehuda Amichai read out his translations of Celan’s poems, Celan was able to suggest improvements.

Back in Paris, Celan wondered whether, in staying behind in Europe, he had not made the wrong choice. He toyed with the idea of accepting a teaching position in Israel. Memories of Jerusalem gave rise to a brief burst of composition, poems that are at the same time spiritual, joyful, and erotic.

Celan had long been troubled by fits of depression. In 1965 he had entered a psychiatric clinic, and later undergone electroshock therapy. At home he was, as Felstiner puts it, “sometimes violent.” He and his wife agreed to live apart. A friend visiting from Bucharest found him “profoundly altered, prematurely aged, taciturn, frowning.” “They’re doing experiments on me,” he said. To his Israeli lover he wrote, in 1970: “They’ve healed me to pieces!” Two months later he drowned himself.

To the historian Erich Kahler, with whom Celan had corresponded, Celan’s suicide proved that to be “both a great German poet and a young Central European Jew growing up in the shadow of the concentration camps” was a burden too great for one man to bear. In a profound sense this verdict on Celan’s suicide is true. But we cannot discount more mundane causes like Claire Goll’s prolonged, mad vendetta, or the nature of the psychiatric care he underwent. Felstiner does not comment directly on the treatment to which Celan’s doctors subjected him, but from Celan’s own bitter asides it is clear they have much to answer for.

Even during Celan’s lifetime there had developed a busy scholarly trade, principally in Germany, based upon him. That trade has today grown to an industry. As Kafka is to German prose, so Celan has become to German poetry.

Despite the pioneering translations of Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Hamburger, and others, Celan did not really penetrate the English-speaking world until he had been taken up in France; and in France Celan was read as a Heideggerian poet, that is to say, as if his poetic career, culminating in suicide, exemplified the end of art in our times, an end in parallel to the end of philosophy as diagnosed by Heidegger.

Though Celan is not what one would call a philosophical poet, a poet of ideas, the link with Heidegger is not fanciful. Celan read Heidegger attentively, as Heidegger read Celan; Hölderlin was a formative influence on both. Celan approved of Heidegger’s view of poetry’s special claims to truth. His own explanation of why he wrote—“so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself”—is fully in tune with Heidegger.

Despite Heidegger’s National Socialist past and his silence on the subject of the death camps, Heidegger was important enough to Celan for Celan, in 1967, to call on him at his retreat in the Black Forest. Afterward he wrote a poem (“Todtnauberg”) about that meeting and the “word/in the heart” he hoped to hear from Heidegger, but failed to get.

What might have been the word Celan was expecting? “Pardon,” suggests Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his book on Celan and Heidegger. But he soon revises his guess. “I was wrong to think…that it was enough to ask forgiveness. [The extermination] is absolutely unforgivable. That is what [Heidegger] should have said.”³

To Lacoue-Labarthe, Celan’s poetry is “in its entirety, a dialogue with Heidegger’s thought.” It is this approach to Celan, dominant in Europe, that has done most to take him out of the orbit of the ordinary educated reader. But there is another school, to which Felstiner clearly adheres, which reads Celan as a fundamentally Jewish poet whose achievement it has been to force back into German high culture (with its ambition to locate its ideal origins in classical Greece), and into the German language, the memory of a Judaic past which a line of German thinkers culminating in Heidegger had tried to obliterate. In this view Celan certainly answers Heidegger but, having answered him, leaves him behind.

3.

Celan began his professional life as a translator and continued to do translations to the end, principally from French into German but also from English, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and (in collaboration) Hebrew. Two volumes of his six-volume Collected Works are given over to his translations. In English Celan devoted himself particularly to Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare. Though his German Dickinson is less rhythmically edgy than the original, he seemed to find in her a kind of compression, syntactic and metaphorical, that he could learn from. As for Shakespeare, he returned again and again to the sonnets. His versions are breathless, urgent, questioning; they do not try to copy Shakespeare’s grace. As Felstiner puts it, Celan sometimes “[edges] beyond dialogue with the English into conflict,” rewriting Shakespeare in accord with his sense of his own times.

For his own translations of Celan, Felstiner takes hints (as no translator before him has done) from Celan’s manuscript revisions and recorded readings, as well as from French versions approved by Celan. An example will show what use he makes of these researches. Celan’s longest poem, “Engführung” (“Stretto”), begins with the words “Verbracht ins/Gelände/mit der untrüglichen Spur“—literally, removed into the terrain (or territory) with the unerring (or unmistakable) track (or trace). What is the best translation of verbracht? A French translation of the poem overseen by Celan uses the word déporté. However, if we check Celan’s German version of the voice-over to Alain Resnais’s documentary film about the death camps, Night and Fog, we find French déporter translated by German deportieren. Deportieren is the word regularly used in official documents for the deportation of prisoners or populations, where it has an abstract and euphemistic color. To avoid such euphemism, Felstiner eschews the cognate English word “deported.” Instead, recalling the idiomatic use of verbracht by internees, he translates it as “taken off”: “Taken off into/the terrain….”

Many of the translations in Felstiner’s recent Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan already appear embedded in the text of his Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew of 1995, but for republication they have been revised and in most cases refined. Part of Felstiner’s enterprise in the 1995 book was to explain, in terms that a reader without German will understand, the nature of the problems that Celan sets for a translator, from unexplained allusions on the one hand to compressed or compounded or invented words on the other, and how he, Felstiner, has responded case by case. Inevitably this entails justifying his own strategies and word-choices, and thus to one of the more unfortunate features of the book: an element of self-promotion.

A review is not the place to go through the close textual analysis needed to compare and judge translations. But it is clear that Felstiner, Pierre Joris, and Popov and McHugh (hereafter Popov-McHugh) are all excellent translators of Celan, though in different ways. Joris’s versions may be less immediately engaging, but he has set himself a more difficult task. Whereas Felstiner and Popov-McHugh are free to select the poems they like best (and, by implication, to avoid those that frustrate them), Joris gives us the two late collections Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967) and Fadensonnen (Threadsuns, 1968) in their entirety, some two hundred poems in all. Since it is by now commonly accepted that Celan composed in sequences and cycles, with poems within a given volume referring backward and forward to other poems, his project is to be applauded. It does, however, bring problems in its train. There are plenty of incompletely achieved poems in Celan, and, more to the point, plenty of moments of near total obscurity. The temperature of Joris’s pages is, understandably, not always white hot.

Felstiner selects and translates about a hundred and sixty poems, distributed over the whole of Celan’s career, among them some moving early lyrics. Popov-McHugh’s selections come mainly from the late work. The overlap between their two volumes is slight—fewer than twenty poems. Only a handful of poems are common to all three translators.

Between Felstiner and Popov-McHugh it is hard to choose. The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative, but Felstiner has his brilliant moments too, most notably in his “Death Fugue,” where the English is in the end drowned out by German (“Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland”). Now and again there are substantive differences on how to parse, and therefore to understand, Celan’s knotted, compacted syntax; in such cases Felstiner is usually the more dependable.

Felstiner is a redoubtable Celan scholar, but Popov-McHugh are no slouches themselves when it comes to scholarship. Felstiner’s limitations emerge when Celan calls for a light touch, for instance in the poem “Selbdritt, selbviert,” which relies on folk-song patterns and nonsense formulas. Popov-McHugh’s version is witty and lyrical, Felstiner’s too sobersided.

Celan’s is not an expansive music: he seems to compose word by word, phrase by phrase, rather than in long breath units. While giving each word and phrase its full weight, the translator has to create rhythmic momentum too:

ich ritt durch den Schnee, hörst du,
ich ritt Gott in die Ferne—die Nahe, er sang,
es war
unser letzter Ritt…

writes Celan.

I rode through the snow, do you hear,
I rode God into the distance—the nearness, he sang,
it was
our last ride…

writes Felstiner.

I rode through the snow, do you read me,
I rode God far—I rode God
near, he sang,
it was
our last ride…

write Popov and McHugh. Felstiner’s lines are rhythmically lifeless. Popov-McHugh’s “I rode God far—I rode God/near” is not there in the original, but it would be hard to argue that its forward drive is inappropriate.

There are many places, on the other hand, when the roles are reversed and Felstiner emerges as the more daring and inventive. “Wenn die Totenmuschel heranschwimmt/will es hier läuten,” writes Celan, which can be translated literally as: when the shell of the dead comes swimming up/there will be peals of bells. “When death’s shell washes up on shore,” write Popov-McHugh, merely going through the motions. “When the deadmen’s conch swims up,” writes Felstiner, leaping from shell to conch and to the conch’s trumpetlike, annunciatory function.

There are also seemingly obvious points that Popov-McHugh miss. In one poem a Wurfholz, a throwing-stick, is flung out into space and returns. Felstiner translates the word by “boomerang,” Popov-McHugh inexplicably by “flung wood.”

In another poem Celan writes of a word that falls into the pit behind his forehead and continues to grow there: he compares the word to the Siebenstern (seven-star), the flower whose learned name is Trientalis europea. In an otherwise excellent version, Popov-McHugh translate Siebenstern simply as “starflower,” failing to pick up the specifically Jewish resonances with the six-pointed Star of David and the seven-branched menorah. Felstiner expands the word to “sevenbranch starflower.”

On the other hand, the flower known in German as die Zeitlose, the timeless (Colchicum autumnale), is unimaginatively translated by Felstiner as “the meadow saffron,” while Popov-McHugh, with justifiable liberty, rename it “the immortelle.”

Sometimes, then, it is Felstiner who hits on exactly the right formulation, sometimes Popov-McHugh, to the point where one feels one could stitch together from their respective versions—with the occasional hint from Pierre Joris—a composite text that would improve on all three. Such a procedure would not be far-fetched or impracticable, given the stylistic commonality of their versions, a commonality stemming of course from Celan.

All three—Felstiner in his biography of Celan, Popov-McHugh in their notes, Joris in his two introductions—have illuminating things to say about Celan’s language. Joris is particularly telling on Celan’s agonistic relation to German:

Celan’s German is an eerie, nearly ghostly language; it is both mother-tongue, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of the dead, and a language the poet has to make up, to re-create, to re-invent, to bring back to life…. Radically dispossessed of any other reality he set about to create his own language—a language as absolutely exiled as he himself. To try to translate it as if it were current, commonly spoken or available German—i.e. to find a similarly current English or American “Umgangssprache”—would be to miss an essential aspect of the poetry.
Celan is the towering European poet of the middle decades of the twentieth century, one who, rather than transcending his times—he had no wish to transcend them—acted as a lightning rod for their most terrible discharges. His unremitting, intimate wrestlings with the German language, which form the substrate of all his later poetry, come across in translation as, at best, overheard rather than heard directly. In this sense translation of the later poetry must always fail. Nevertheless, two generations of translators have striven, with unexampled resourcefulness and devotion, to bring home in English what can be brought. For the work of the new generation we can only be grateful.