Centuries Surround Me With Fire: On a Late Celan Translation of Mandelstam (Stephen Ross, Concordia University)

Location: Leacock 738

On May 10, 1967, Paul Celan (1920-70) wrote a ten-line poem, "Nah, im Aortenbogen" (near, in the aortic arch) on the inside cover of a human anatomy textbook he had recently acquired while hospitalized at Sainte-Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris. Though the poem has apparently been picked clean by critics, I will argue that its key operation--a translation of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) that is far more than a translation--has gone unnoticed. Beginning with a very close reading of the poem itself, the talk will drive toward a theory of poetic translation that brings together Celan's readings in Kabbalah, human anatomy, and psychoanalysis.

Stephen Ross is associate professor of English at Concordia University and editor of Modernism/modernity. He is the author Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP) and coeditor of Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury).

Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.