Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

While Paul Celan's lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan's advocacy for reading words with the acute accent of the present calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue duree of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on Niedrigwasser, a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.

Automated summary

This article explores the metaphor and silence in Paul Celan's poetry regarding colonial and imperial histories. By analyzing the poem "Niedrigwasser" in the collection "Sprachgitter," the article examines the poem's multiple temporalities and its concern for histories of racial violence.