The Stillest Night Page 1 of 27 PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use. Subscriber: Harvard University Library; date: 01 September 2021 Philology of the Flesh John T. Hamilton Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780226572826 Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2019 DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226572963.001.0001 The Stillest Night John T. Hamilton DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226572963.003.0007 Abstract and Keywords The final chapter investigates the work of the German poet Paul Celan. A consideration of his "Meridian" speech is shown to rehearse most of the themes discussed to this point. This thematic overview is then interrogated and complicated by a reading of Celan's poem "Tenebrae." To conclude, the chapter examines Celan's provocative translations of Emily Dickinson. Keywords: Paul Celan, Poetics of Obscurity, Translation Midway through his well-known Meridian speech, which he delivered on October 22, 1960, on the occasion of accepting the Büchner Prize for Literature, Paul Celan takes the opportunity to address recent public reproaches against the obscurity or opacity of his poetry: Ladies and Gentlemen, it is today commonplace, to reproach poetry with its “opacity”— Permit me at this point, abruptly—but hasn’t something here suddenly opened up?—permit me, to cite here a word from Pascal, a word that I read some time ago in Leo Schestov: “Ne nous reprochez pas le manque de clarté puisque nous en faisons profession!”—That is, I believe, if not the congenital [obscurity of poetry], then arguably the obscurity attributed to poetry for the sake of an encounter from a—perhaps of its own design—distance or strangeness. 1 (p.182) Thus, at the meridian point of The Meridian, despite the somewhat convoluted syntax— the starts and stops, the retractions and corrections, the intruding series of citations (quoting Schestov quoting Pascal)—Celan arguably intends to clarify his position. He wants to reveal where he stands in relation to poetry, how he encounters poetry, and thus, presumably, how his own poetry should be encountered. Any contradiction between the discursive form and its content, between Celan’s intention to clarify and the tenebrous manner of his prose, may be resolved by observing that the speech strives to elucidate poetic obscurity, not by instructing the audience on how to interpret or comprehend difficult texts, not by pointing the way out of otherwise impassible or impossible passages, but rather by conferring value to obscurity itself.