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A More Complex Occasion
Pierre Joris
In high school, in
Luxembourg where I
lived until I was 18, I
heard a reading of Paul
Celan’s most famous
poem, “Todesfuge /
Death Fugue.” It may
have been the one
absolute epiphany I
experienced. It was not
the gorgeousness of
the verbal music and of the poem’s elegant fugal construction,
nor was it the obvious horror of the content, the exterminated
bodies of the Jews going up in smoke to be buried in the air
that created this effect. No, it was the abyss opened by the
seemingly impossible and discrepant combination of those two
contradictory elements into which I fell—making me realize
that there was a use of language different from all other ones, be
that daily speech or novelistic storytelling. And that other use of
language was poetry.
I never recovered from this discovery and some five years
later—years during which I had written my juvenile poems
and stories in French and in German—when I decided to write
poetry in English and make that my life’s work, I also realized
that translation would have to be an essential part of the work.
Not only because I foolishly thought at the time that literary
translation could be a way of making a living as a poet, but
also because I saw translation as both a duty and a core poetic
learning experience. A duty, because I had the languages and
therefore felt it to be my ethical responsibility to help ferry things
from one language to an other so that the language-challenged
could get some sense of what was being thought and written and
felt elsewhere in the world. A core learning experience, because I
never believed one could learn to write poetry in creative writing
classes, nor do I believe in the old romantic notions of genius or
muse or inspiration, but I do think—no, I know—that reading is
essential to writing.
The closest reading—total immersion, in fact—into the
strongest and most mysterious and challenging work you can
encounter (and the very act of going to encounter it), is finally
66
National Endowment for the Arts