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Editor's Column: Uprooted Words on a Bookshelf in Chernivtsi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marianne Hirsch
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WHEN PAUL CELAN ACCEPTED THE BREMEN LITERATURE PRIZE in 1958, he used the occasion to reflect on the region of his birth: “The landscape from which I—by what detours! But are there such things: detours?—the landscape from which I come to you might be unfamiliar to most of you.” On the syntactic level, Celan's speech performs the detours (Umwege), repetitions, and redoublings of his journey to Germany, a country in which he never lived or spent more than a few weeks but whose language he persisted in calling his own:

It is the landscape that was home to a not inconsiderable portion of those Hasidic tales that Martin Buber has retold for us all in German. It was, if I may add to this topographic sketch something that appears before my eyes now from very far away—it was a region in which human beings and books used to live. There, in the former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now fallen into historylessness [Geschichtslosigkeit]… Bremen… still had the ring of the unreachable.… Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. (“Speech” 395; Gesammelte Werke 185-86)

Information

Type
Editorial
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 5 , October 2006, pp. 1393 - 1404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

References

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