Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv / Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of Time’

As a short, hand-written inscription proposes in late 1967, Paul Celan constructed a poem that summarized long archival research. ‘Nah im Aortenbogen’ (‘Near, in the Aorta’s Arch’) brought a long and a fruitful symbiosis to completion. But is this symbiosis—a poetic fusion of the German and the Hebrew—a true one? The last line of the poem, ‘Ziw, that light’ offers a different option. As my paper proposes, the poem represents a whole poetic archive, constructed from a long dialogue with both German and Jewish thought, which are present in the poem via systems formed by Martin Heidegger and Gershom Scholem. Still further, as the poem and the inscription suggest, relate to a Yiddish poem by Moishe-Leib Halpern and a sermon by the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Celan’s poem pulls all these different voices to the present, and demostrates how an archive of lost voices is trasnformed, through ‘a whole in time’, to the present moment. It is, one should not forget, grounded and anchored in a hole, in the ‘not-is’, in the absence located where ‘nothingness’ lies. ‘Near, in the Aorta’s Arch’ proposes all this in three short stanzas: a whole world is to be found, sometimes, where nothingness offers more than the material ‘is’.