Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
by Jean Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop. City Lights, 200 pp., $15.95.

Far from being a straightforward narrative, Jean Daive’s memoir-cum-poetic-reverie Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is yet all the more rewarding for its doggedly lucid wandering through recurring vagaries of symbol and motif. Recalling dialogues from twenty years previous to the writing, Daive intertwines his own life and times as he reconstructs the many mostly-lunchtime hours he spent meeting with Celan over the final years of the older poet’s life from 1965 to 1970. These five critical years were finally surrendered upon Celan’s abrupt suicide, leaving the twenty-eight year old Daive brooding over the relationship for years to come. The result is a haunted weaving of past-upon-past and present-within-past. When Daive was with Celan, he was apparently so swayed by being in the elder poet’s powerful presence that even the most casual remark or gesture came weighted with heady significance. Relaying transitory details of the encounters, Daive leavens the poetic back-and-forth exchanges between the two of them with emotional heft. Needless to say, attempting to manifest such occasions in writing, much like describing the momentary nucleus in the act of writing a poem, is to come right up against what cannot be put into words, an abyss that’s nonetheless grounded in the actual. This is the central challenge of Daive’s book.

This translation of Daive’s Sous la Coupole (P.O.L. 1996), first appearing from translator Rosmarie Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press in 2009, has now — 2020 marks not only Celan’s centennial birthday, but also the 50th anniversary of his death — been reissued by City Lights with the addition of a useful scholarly introduction by Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard. City Lights serving as the publisher is rather fitting as not only is San Francisco “sister city” to Paris, it was also home to the first serious large collection of material in English on Celan in Paris to appear: Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France (ACTS 8/9, 1988) edited by one of San Francisco’s own poets, the late Benjamin Hollander. In fact, that gathering was the first place I encountered work by, on, and about Celan. What’s more, Daive’s presence in the collection is fairly substantial, and I am sure that it was reading about his relationship to Celan there that led me several years ago to read the Burning Deck edition of Under the Dome.

The fraught nature of Celan’s relationship to German — the language in which his poems are written and the language of the Nazis (the Romanian-Jewish Celan survived a labour camp only to learn, upon his release in 1944, of the deaths of his parents in a similar camp; he eventually settled in Paris in 1948) — hangs over his entire oeuvre and serves as unavoidable backdrop to Under the Dome. Daive and Celan shared multiple languages, and translating each other’s works brought them together, Daive bringing Celan’s German into French and, in a generously reciprocal gesture, Celan translating Daive’s Décimale blanche into German. In turn, Waldrop’s translation of course brings Daive’s French into English.

As an eminent poet-translator, Waldrop’s abilities are ideal for bringing Daive’s complex, multi-layered text over into English. None too easy an accomplishment, given that Daive presents a crisscrossing narrative moving between multiple periods of time. Scenes are awash in eerie moments, not spooky per se, but there is an unsettling sense to them in terms of time and place. Daive’s writing is so often seemingly overcome by his emotions triggered by his shifting memories, times spent with Celan intermixed with recalling various moments spent with different girlfriends of his from over the years. He is anything but stoic. As readers, we are regularly set down mid-scene without footing as to when or where we might be: “One winter, at the window, I watch the snow falling and, turning around, I see in the room a shadow with a foamy head: Greta, skull plunged into a basin, is washing her hair.” The abundance of these near-cinematic snapshots recall the abrupt cutaways and action-oriented films of the French New Wave and deliver us directly into Daive’s recollections and into his historical consciousness, the moment in time of which he is an expression and reflection. 

Kaufman and Gerard’s introduction explores the intricacies involved with all this translating between languages:

It tells us a lot about the layers of language and memory that make up Under the Dome’s vault that Waldrop declines to translate: “Dé – porté dans l’étendue” as she translates the rest of Daive’s French. Here, Daive does more than transmit the sense of “Verbracht ins/Gelände”; the violent dislocation of French morphology bears the trace of the crime — “das Verbrechen” — that echoes in the German. Waldrop, translating the French, is thus justified in leaving this language fragment “in the original,” since this French is not only French. It is freighted with Celan’s German, which, though deported into French, retains its “unmistakable trace.” 

It’s fascinating to read this explication of how, even without Daive’s original French text at hand, the language-play at work throughout is inextricably present.  Speaking to the unique structuring of Daive’s work, they also offer apt formulations of the “music-like memory-structures” Daive assembles when presenting his recollections. Staying attendant to the overlapping twists and turns of his webbed narrative requires a focused commitment similar to listening to an intricate, subtly paced, musical composition:

We read of work sessions that are followed by… walks and talks; coffees followed or preceded by… walks and talks; dinners that come after yet still precede more… walks and talks; and—sometimes, just simply—walks and talks. With silence a crucial component of what it means to walk, to talk, to put the two into relation. 

And they continue delineating the play of languages at work within Daive’s title: 

The ‘dome’ of the book’s title refers in the first place to the shade-shelter formed by the trees’ foliage, the ‘foliage’ that, in French and German, among other languages, yields terms that can signify ‘leaf’ or ‘page’: feuille; Blatt. The trees — primarily chestnut and paulownia — that populate the Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris’s Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lives, and in whose streets and cafés Celan and Daive stroll, to think aloud, to work: these trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative— dome. 

As we follow along with Daive and Celan wandering about Paris like two walking enigmas struck by mutual recognition of the value each of them has to offer the other, the streets, parks, and squares the two meet in and stroll through come to life, with the city playing a central role throughout. Not only providing the physical setting as it were for the scenes of the poets’ meetings, but also serving metaphorically for the shelter, literal “dome”, under which their exchanges occurred; permanently stamping Celan’s haunting presence upon Daive’s imagination. This becomes all the more inescapable at the close of his book when Daive, by the chance decision of his then-partner Edith, moves into the very building where Celan once did:

We go to Rue Tournefort. I push open the gate and discover finally the incredible courtyard where our steps echo with downright ‘incestuous’ violence. I discover the hallways with their pipes, wires, and plumbing. I imagine Paul coming home, walking along these cables. We were happy, insouciant, lighthearted. Many images come back to me.

Daive’s recollections bring us to the pillars upon which Celan’s poetry is mounted. 

In a café, Paul Celan goes through his identity for me in a neutral, toneless voice, the acoustic equivalent of a photomat.
— Jean Daive, I was born in Bukovina, in Czernowitz.

He weighs his words carefully. Every moment he evaluates the word. I should add: every moment he evaluates silence.

I’ve come to understand that a silence — is — the negative of a moment of thought and that it needs to be heard thoroughly. The moments he tells of his identity have echoes of an epic. Everything falls into place: the father, the mother, Judaism, languages, disappearances, the dismembered family regrouped in the camps, then destroyed, the war, poetry. Tours, Paris. Neutral voice, always. Nothing too much.  

Time looks on. We are trembling. There must be a wound inside words that communicates. Paul Celan:
— I have paid. I can say that I have paid.

Reading these passages, we confront the utter loss mixed with incomparable despair beyond concilation, especially in light of his suicide, that lies back of Celan’s poetry. Writing provided the means by which he sought to stave off the darkness to which he finally succumbed.  Daive’s descriptions preserve the poetic energy that spurred their exchanges over translation, but also daily matters, with the functioning of memory ever present. He captures a near physical sense of their dialogues. Offering glimpses of the near-impossible capturing of two imaginations attracted towards one another’s devotion to a language of communication, strung out upon threads of fragile inquiry into deepest questions of existence.

Daive’s book tenders immersion into experiencing the world as a poem, as he describes: “The world is illegible and the matter of words engenders a structure: the poem”. The poet’s role is to pay attention to how language is used for communication, say, in overheard exchanges, as Daive describes: Celan “listens to conversations, notes a word heard in a store, in the street”. Between the two poets, the matter of poetry is constant. Daive captures momentary instances in which he recognized the poet-at-work within the subtlest of Celan’s behaviors: 

We are walking, and the shade of the trees covers us with a dome, wherein we move and wherein we direct our words. Paul manipulates words while looking, on the imaginary screen of the trees he keeps his eyes on, at his mind’s operating field, enlarged or not according to a causal scale that I can sometimes anticipate.

Daive regularly returns to recollecting Celan’s smile. Always it comes with a mysterious quality that Daive never seeks to explain away but simply lets stand:

Paul orders two steaks and two glasses of port that stay with us all through lunch. The two plates arrive, followed by two glasses of port. Paul looks at me, smiling:
—I won’t say, to the health of the serpent.

Reading Daive’s book, I often alternated between feeling that it’s nearly as if there’s a murder-mystery afoot back of its pages or, pursuing the noir vibe even further, an absurdly conjectured lover’s triangle between Daive, Celan, and Celan’s wife Gisèle. There’s such definite strangeness, a creepy otherness shrouding his descriptions. This is likely just the over-engagement of my own imagination. Daive’s book is so intimate — while still always holding the reader at a certain distance — it encourages such fanciful dalliances. Daive and Celan clearly shared a peculiar closeness, one that refuses the professional, yet also resists being entirely personal. Yet it was decidedly poetic — endlessly and compellingly exploring as it does, in poet Robert Duncan’s words, “the sounds and silences of language” where “creativity in language works.” And with a decidedly playful quality at times cast over it. A lasting testament to how intense the personal interaction becomes when the parties share mutually engaged lives revolving around poetry. At one point, walking in the snowy street, Daive recalls Celan losing his footing and grabbing ahold of his arm for support: “He laughs. We’re slipping. He laughs”.  //