What Is Heard in the Mountains: Paul Celan’s Gespräch im Gebirg in the Light of its Hebrew Translation

This article focusses on Paul Celan’s Gesprach im Gebirg [Conversation in the Mountains] in the light of its Hebrew translation. Written in 1959, this short prose text is regarded as Celan’s response to Theodor W. Adorno’s statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” As various scholars have pointed out, the question of sound is central to this response: How to bear witness to that which can no longer be heard? This question becomes even more crucial when dealing with issues of translation. In his epilogue to the Hebrew collection, Shimon Sandbank, the Hebrew translator, explains the difficulty of translating Celan’s hermetic work into Hebrew in general, and this prose text in particular. For example, in order to transfer the Yiddish syntax that Celan uses in the German, which cannot be translated into Hebrew, Sandbank introduced Yiddish words that do not appear in the original text. With regard to these dilemmas, I would ask: What does one hear when listening to Celan in Hebrew, and what happens to the language of the Other, the other language, in the transformation from German into Hebrew? This article suggests that the decisions taken by the Hebrew translator invite the reader to reconsider the relationships between the ethical and the poetical characteristics of Celan’s work.