„bei / beider Neige“. Ortlose Sprache in Gedichten Paul Celans
Un-Settled Language in Poems by Paul Celan

Summary/Abstract: The extraordinary richness of multilingualism in Paul Celan’s poetry has of-ten been remarked. However, ‘multilingualism’ might not be the best word, since Celan’s one-of-a-kind conjuncture of languages and meanings/ambiguity rather undermines language categories and especially the notion of national languages altogether. In the poem “Kermorvan” for example, knowing the words’ multilingual etymologies and applying language-structures from Hebrew establishes meaningful connections among them. Combining multi-lingualism and ambiguity, Celan’s Sprachigkeit (languality1) exposes the dynamics and movement of language itself, including the histories, contacts and ambivalences of words and idioms. In this way, his insistent claim to write in one language corrects the idea of exchangeable, co-existing languages towards an understanding of their interconnectedness, which might best be described by David Gramling’s term semiodiversity. In “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit”, the word “Neige” incorporates such an idea of the larger movements of language. It is used similarly to a tilted image to adhere to at least three languages and numerous meanings in a snowball-like principle. The new view of (multi-)lingualism shown in the poem and in Celan’s poetic utterances replaces not only ideas of a simple mapping between things and words (de Saussure) or metaphors and meanings in language. It also replaces the understanding of a general translatability among all languages of the world. Last but not least, in the specific discourse on Jewish language, it resists the notion of a general foreignness towards all languages which has traditionally been projected onto Jews, by positioning itself inside the larger movements of language itself.

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