Jean Daive

I'll be teaching a class on this book starting 11/6/2021. Information and sign-up link below!

After Friendship: Walks with Paul Celan, with Zoe Tuck

[a 6-week online program via zoom; Saturdays at 12pm EST/9am PDT/5pm GMT+1; begins 11/6]

About this workshop:

After Friendship is the last of Zoe Tuck’s year-long project of reading texts about/around/produced through friendship. Each of the classes has centered on closely reading a particular text. In this class that text is Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, which chronicles the friendship between poet-translators Daive and Celan. As such, After Friendship carries forward inquiries into the relationship between translation and friendship. Being a memoir composed after Celan’s death, Under the Dome raises questions about the aftermath of friendship. How do we remember lost friends? What is at stake when we memorialize them?

With Under the Dome, we also get to approach the setting of friendship. As Robert Kaufman & Philip Gerard note in their introduction:

“The ‘dome’ of the book’s title refers in the first place to the shade-shelter formed by the trees’ foliage, the ‘foliage’ that, in French and German, among other languages, yields terms that can signify ‘leaf’ or ‘page’: feuille; Blatt. The trees—primarily chestnut and paulownia—that populate the Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris’ Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lives, and in whose streets and cafés Celan and Daive delight to stroll, to think aloud, to work: these trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative—dome.”

Here is a suggestive opportunity to engage the ecopoetics of friendship. Here, also, we have an opportunity to study urban poetics: how do the shapes of a city and a society dictate the shape of a relationship? If, as Gaston Bachelard writes, “the house protects the dreamer,” what shelters the friend?

Logistics: We will meet once a week for two hours on zoom, with time divided between discussion of the reading and writing exercises in support of the ongoing epistolary project. Recordings of classes and transcripts will be made available to participants, along with weekly video lectures, lecture notes, and secondary readings, when applicable.… (més)

I knew very little about this poem or poet when I picked the book up, and I know very little know. White space on the page does a lot of work here; there's some of the metaphysical abyss/void/ennui/absence unearned capital that plagues French intellectual life (as well as American); but there's also a very pleasing and disturbing cumulative effect.

A quick google tells me that this was originally translated into English by Cid Corman, and was translated into German by Paul Celan, so that should give you some idea of what to expect. This translation, by Norma Cole, works perfectly well, though she's held back on some of the phrases that, let's say, a contemporary American poet would not use (je l'ai entendue pleurer dans sa race becomes I found her crying in the [rather than 'her'] race). It's hard to complain too much.… (més)