Ian Fairley translates Paul Celan’s Augenblicke as follows:
Instants whose eyewink
no brightness sleeps.
Increate, in every place,
gather yourself,
stay.
Whereas Pierre Joris offers:
Eye-glances, whose winks,
no brightness sleeps.
Undebecome, everywhere,
gather yourself,
stand.
Reading this the first few times, I took increate for a neologism. But the OED gives it as “not created, uncreated: said of divine beings or attributes”, citing Milton’s Bright effluence of bright essence increate from Paradise Lost. The original German word is unentworden. Fairley’s version reaches for the archaic and metaphysical. Joris, more literal, invents undebecome. Shira Wolosky, writing on Celan, Beckett and Eliot, proposes Un-dis-becoming. Fairley’s choice, for all its obscurity, carries the residue of a metaphysical grammar. It also risks clarity for tone, which feels fitting.
Esther Cameron, a poet shaped by Celan, once noted: “I have seen a postcard, written in the last months of [Celan’s] life, whose message consisted of one word: ‘Standing’.”
I tend to favour Fairley’s translation, though I hesitate over eyewink. I cannot judge how much of Celan is retained. The poem seems to have been avoided by Hamburger and Young. Celan, like Montale, resists the assumption that a translator must first fully understand. One reads across versions to approximate an intention that may never have settled, even for the poet.
The poems come without footnotes, almost in refusal. Celan cared deeply for etymology, and his work attracts those with a similar attention to origin and drift. Hours can pass in the pursuit of a single phrase. The difficulty is not exclusionary, but intimate. The obscurity invites reading that is not interpretive alone, but devotional.
John Felstiner, in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, writes:
Yet with lyric verse as charged as Celan’s, the translator enters its evolution. Hölderlin knew this vis-à-vis Sophocles, Rilke vis-à-vis Valéry, to name the German poets whom Celan prized. In After Babel, George Steiner writes about translation at its fullest, saying the process culminates in restitution: something is given back to the source in return for what is lost. After all, the act of translation repeats an original poem with a difference: each line of verse in English, reflecting backward towards its origin, is scrolling one line closer to the future.
In his Meridian speech, Celan said: “the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet.” His frustration with language does not dissolve into silence, but into a sense that what matters most remains just beyond speech, a tension never resolved, only returned to.