Translating Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” into Words, Sounds, and Images

This presentation will showcase a selection of translations in the form of printed words, sounds, and images, the outcome of a project spearheaded by the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. With the participation of almost thirty graduate students and professors from diverse national, religious, and academic backgrounds, we have created a rich body of aesthetic, audio-visual, and literary creations of “Death Fugue” in Arabic, Chinese, French, English, Italian, Memon, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu, to commemorate Yom HaShoah in May 2016. The commemoration of Yom HaShoah became a commemoration of the bond between word and meaning, between human and human, and Celan’s attempt to restore a lost human relationship through his poetry. Indeed, his poetry is itself an attempt to translate the ineffable into the effable, or perhaps one ineffable into another. The presentation will examine Celan’s famous poem, in which pain and beauty undergo a profound collision, as well as the ways in which various languages struggle to articulate and transmit that collision. One way in which the Nazis undertook an assault on the Jewish soul was to assault language itself in a tearing of word from meaning. The paper will bring out ways in which the challenges of translation are related to the mending of a connection between word and meaning.