Counter-quotation

The defiance of poetic tradition in Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam

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This dissertation concentrates on problems of quotation, tradition, and translation in the poetry of Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. While examining the nature of poetic inheritance, Celan often refers to Russian poetry and, in particular, to Osip Mandelstam, who, in his turn, understands poetry as an essentially dialogic process. Both for Celan and for Mandelstam, every new poem is an utterance within a poetic conversation. Nowhere is the dialectic of newness and tradition better exemplified than in the act of quotation, both direct and indirect. For this reason, I begin my dissertation with a chapter discussing Celan's idea of quotation as "encounter" in poetic dialogue. Celan welcomes the understanding of poetry as conversation and yet also indicates the limits to which the act of welcoming can be reciprocated. This limit is contained in the so-called "counter-word" (Gegenwort). In my second chapter, I turn to Celan's own encounters with Osip Mandelstam concerning the act or event of "breathturn" (Atemwende), which is a translation and transformation of Mandelstam's poetics of breathing, as it unfolds in his Voronezh Notebooks. The problem of stopping and re-starting breath becomes, as I argue, a way of reconceiving both the content and the idea of tradition. In my concluding chapter, I analyze Celan's own adaptations of Osip Mandelstam's poetry through the theory of translation as an encounter that defies tradition while at the same time making a new tradition possible. Throughout my thesis, I discuss the degree to which Celan's intense engagement with his "conversation partners" can be considered paradigmatic of the poetic encounter as such.