Presence/ Absence/ Traces. Contemporary Artists on Jewish Warsaw

Page 45

Adam Lipszyc

A d a m L ip s z y c In the Throat: Nothing. Some Remarks o n t h e Wo r k o f Lu í s a N ó b r e g a

In the poem Es ist alles anders (It’s all different) from the Die Niemandrose (The No-Man’s Rose) collection Paul Celan writes: (…) what is called, your land back of the mountain, back of the year? I know what it’s called. Like the Winter’s Tale it’s called, it’s called like the Summer’s Tale, your mother’s Three Year Land, that was it, this is it, it wanders everywhere, like language, throw it away, throw it away, then you’ll have it again, like that pebble from the Moravian Basin, your thought carried to Prague, on the grave, on the graves, into life (…) (a) —— transl. by J. Felstiner

a

A pebble, traditionally put on a Jewish grave, is transferred by the power of thought to Bohemia, which in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale could be reached by ship — hence, in the poetic space, or at least in one of the poems by Celan’s friend, Ingeborg Bachmann, “Bohemia lies by the sea” — to Prague, where the poet’s mother and her family took shelter from the turmoil of World War I for three years. She did not survive the Second World War, and she had no grave on which Celan could leave a pebble. The only grave — or rather an absence of grave — that he could build for her was in the language. However, because poetic gesture must hesitate between an attempt to build a grave and an attempt to mark its absence, the languagepebble has to be constantly thrown away in order to come back, in a gesture resembling a game of fort–da, away–back, the game of a boy throwing away and pulling back a wooden spool of string. The game which the grandfather of that boy, Sigmund Freud (incidentally, born in Moravia), described as P. Celan, Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, ed. B. Wiedemann, (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005), pp. 162–163. 43


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