On Tuesday, April 16, 2013 from 2-4 pm, the Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Diefenbaker Chair hosted the stimulating colloquium “Celan's Orientation Between the Languages”.
Prof. Na'ama Rokem of the University of Chicago (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) presented her work on the poet Paul Celan (1920-1970).
The talk described two phenomena in the poetic and poetological writing of Paul Celan and asked how they are related. The first is his use of figures related to navigation, orientation, maps and directionality. A central point of reference here is “The Meridian”, Celan’s Büchner prize speech, a text that explicates the orientation of the poem toward an other and engages with the philosophical uses of the term orientation. The second phenomenon is Celan’s multilingualism, specifically his use of Hebrew words in poems written both before, and, especially after he had delivered his Büchner speech. If the multilingual poem is a site of encounter, what is the map of that site? How do readers – and the writer – orient and reorient themselves in this encounter?
This is part of a larger project that deals with German-Jewish and Hebrew literature through the prism of bilingualism and self translation. Prof. Rokem will discuss some of the broader questions that are driving this study such as: How do multilingualism and translation change and challenge our perceptions of literary and cultural histories? What are the interdisciplinary demands – and possibilities – of working on these topics? For example, does this open up new conversations between literary studies and linguistics? What are the strategies for reading and interpreting bilingual or self-translated texts?
