Paul Celan, «Du darfst mich getrost» (Atemwende, 1967):
Du darfst mich getrost
mit Schnee bewirten:
sooft ich Schulter an Schulter
mit dem Maulbeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer,
schrie sein jüngstes
Blatt.
Scots translation by David Kinloch:
Ye caun traistly
ser me wi snaw:
whenever shouder tae shouder
ah stapit thru simmer wi the mulberry
its smaaest leaf
skreicht
Traistly ‘confidently; assuredly; truly’; ser ‘to be of service or advantage to; to satisfy or content, specif. with food or drink’; stap ‘to step, walk, stroll’; simmer ‘summer’; skreich ‘to shriek, scream, screech, utter a high shrill cry.’ I like the translation a lot; “ser” for “bewirten” ‘to treat, feast, regale, entertain’ is particularly successful. (Snaw previously at LH. In case you’re wondering, mulberry is a perfectly good Scots word; it just happens to be spelled exactly like the English equivalent.)
“Me you can boldly
entertain with snow!”
each time I shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree strode through summer,
shrieked its youngest
leaf.
It is clear that the author wanted ABBACCA where A has final stress and B and C have penultimate stress, so maybe:
You can feel free
To pelt me with snowballs,
As I strode shoulder to shoulder
With this mulberry tree
Oft through the summer
Shrieked its youngest
Leaf.
Gotta get the basics right before tarting them up.
#
Feel free
To refresh me with snow.
Each time I strolled side by side
With the mulberry through the summer,
Its youngest leaf wailed.
#
du darfst mich getrost bewirten is a fancy way of saying du darfst mich bewirten. getrost is nothing to make a fuss about, it’s a reassuring particle meaning “not to worry”. There is no “boldly” here.
There is no “pelting with snowballs” either. bewirten is a neutral word for what restaurants do for their clients, or also, less specifically, “provide refreshment”. “Entertain” is something different.
jüngstes Blatt suggests a new-born baby. schreien is the standard word for what babies do. In English that’s wail/cry/scream. A hysterical baby could “shriek”, but the poem shows no cause for shrieking.
Tart if you will, but tart with art. And don’t start with addled eggs.
@stu
1. I took the somewhat out-of-place bewirten as a substitution for the more expected “bewerfen”, the latter also more likely to induce a higher pitched utterance from the recipient.
2. You are right that wailed is better, however for me the poem has many sh sounds, evoking snow…in Ireland you could even get away with shtrode.
Also I liked Noetica’s version and was just interested in restoring rhythm.
I took the somewhat out-of-place bewirten as a substitution for the more expected “bewerfen”
Definitely not. Celan is not the kind of poet who provides a muddled sort-of-synonym for a more accurate verb, and still less is he the kind of poet who invites a pelting with snowballs. He is saying what he means, that he wants to be (as the Scots says) served with snow, because he doesn’t care for summer, when he has to listen to the mulberry leaves screaming.
I took the somewhat out-of-place bewirten as a substitution for the more expected “bewerfen”
What is “out of place” in a poem ? bewirten here makes perfect sense to me, because it’s a plain ol’ German word. The poem is as straightforward as a saltine cracker, vocabulary-wise.
German was Celan’s native language. If he were still alive, I doubt you would have written to admonish him for infelicity.
__
…the images and the implications of the words
in “Du Darfst” are multi-layered and profoundly ambiguous. For example, in the first verse, a German reader might anticipate “bewerfen” instead
of “bewirten.” The “wrong word” startles…it emphasizes the surrounding stillness….
—
Yi Chen, “Semiosis of Translation in Wang Wei’s and Paul Celan’s Hermetic Poetry”, Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 9(2)/2012: 87−102
It is true that Yi Chen may be just another foolish person like me, but as we say in Irish, “tuigeann Tadhg Taidhgín”. Please note also that I did not mean to criticise C for his choice of words; if poetry did not do such things, it might as well be prose.
It’s a pity that the “Maul” of “Maulbeerbaum” gets lost in translation – no such thing as “Mawberry” in Scots or English.
Also, can “smaaest” refer to a newborn baby in Scots?
For example, in the first verse, a German reader might anticipate “bewerfen” instead of “bewirten.” The “wrong word” startles
Right, but the fact is that the word he chose is the right word for the poem, and it doesn’t make any sense to translate as if he had chosen the one that a German reader might anticipate.
Yi Chen may be just another foolish person
A little girl is not foolish for putting on her mother’s dress and high heels in order to seem glamorous. She is merely out of her competence.
You link me an article in German, written by someone with at least Abitur who finds “profound ambiguity” in those first two lines, and we can talk. Someone whose German doesn’t stop at snowballs.
Apart from that: “pelt with snowballs” would be mit Schneebällen bewerfen. mit Schnee bewerfen is “throw snow at”.
After reading mit Schnee, I did not pause to laboriously anticipate the next word, but simply read it: bewirten. Of course it was a nice surprise, but no snowballs melted. mit X bewirten is bog-standard German.
@hat
Feel free to replace “pelt” with “treat” or “host”. But what do we do with “snowballs”? “Snowflakes”?
@stu
This seems to have captured your attention and resulted in a rather demanding stance on your part. What do you want me to do or say?
Just snow. Plain old snow. The poem, unlike the poet, has no balls. (<-- to preempt Stu)
Postempt.
Stu, many thanks. I could not assay the weight or exact semantic locus of getrost, for example.
Paddy, my version was concerned less with where the stresses clunk down than with the syllable count in each line – which I preserved exactly, along with the content integrity of each line. That seemed to be one reasonable choice, among the competing species of fidelity in executing the current impossible task. What is a line for Celan, anyway? My own next iteration:
“Me you can really
wreathe with swirls of snow!”
each time I shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree strode through summer,
squealed its youngest
leaf.
What’s right in one way elbows out what would be right in another way. The task is intractable, and tastes will differ wildly. What I will not do is abandon my concern with structure below the level of the line. That would yield lineated prose, not verse.
Celan … is saying what he means, that he wants to be (as the Scots says) served with snow
Could somebody explain how we know whether the lines about snow are spoken by the leaf (in quotation marks, as Noetica has it), or by the poet? Or is it ambiguous? I have no clue what the colon indicates there in German.
I’m pretty sure that’s just Noetica’s fancy; I see no reason to think that’s what Celan intended. But I am neither a German speaker nor a Celan specialist, so I speak under correction, as always.
Nor any reason not to think that’s what he intended, is there? Which of the two interpretations makes immediate and compelling “sense”, given the punctuation and other oddly managed features? One, the other, both, or neither? (Show all working.)
Nor any reason not to think that’s what he intended, is there?
Yes, there is — because it’s a forced interpretation that would require concrete evidence. A six-line lyric poem is not expected to switch speakers in midstream.
Forced as you take it Hat, not as I take it – in the absence of a survey of Celan’s ways with punctuation. The verb in the second last line may take an object, as “said” would. On that reading, what is said is the content of the first two lines. Makes as much sense to me as another reading. Who is the du? Who is the mich? Who knows, and how? But the single-word last line might be intended to supply the delayed answer in striking fashion. As for expectations, I suggest they are set up with a view to thwarting them.
Certainty is not a good look here. Ambiguity and fluidity of selfhood may well be in play. They make for a good summer–winter evanescence poem.
There are a small number of ways to construe syntax in the poem. I feel that Noetica’s way is semantically a bit of a stretch, but it does make the position of schrie seem less like poetically licensed inversion, or whatever it’s called (the “said he” kind of thing).
My assumption is that with many a poet, as (anecdotally) with P.T. Barnum, the secret of their success is: keep ’em guessing. That is also Heidegger’s ill-kept secret. Look at the mileage Celan clocked up in this thread alone, with one pome !
In other news, here’s a discussion on SWR2 from November 2020: Wie heute Paul Celan gelesen wird. YIL that Todesfuge did not meet with universal intelligence in 1952. But there was praise for its “beauty”. No Shoah consciousness in those years, say the discussers.
Here is your man reading Todesfuge.
Also Celans Büchnerpreisrede, which heads straight into Dantons Tod, Leonce und Lena and other unfamiliar-to-me-and-why-pretend-otherwise territory.
As for expectations, I suggest they are set up with a view to thwarting them.
Da sagst du was ! The Principle of Pricktease. Poetry as Wallet-tied-to-a-string.
Furriners are infesting even Spiegel – or the editors are hiring Germans who don’t give a damn. The value of appeal to authority is tanking.
Look at this on today’s website:
# Wegen eines Streits um Fördergelder blockiert Ungarn in Brüssel zahlreiche EU-Projekte. Nun haben sich die Mitgliedstaaten trotzdem auf Milliardenhilfen für die Ukraine geeinigt – entgegen des Vetos aus Budapest. #
They did the squeaky-clean genitive with wegen, although vox pop tends to go for the dative. But entgegen des Vetos is just high-falutin’ ignernt.
Footnote on getrost as reassuring particle: the less fancy, semantically 100% equivalent particle is ruhig.
E: Du kannst mir ruhig glauben!
V: Und du kannst mir getrost am Buckel runterrutschen!
Certainty is not a good look here.
Ah well, it is my vice.
It’s part and parcel of the anarchist package.
From Barbara Wiedemann’s commentary:
Paul Celan: Die Gedichte ; neue kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band / herausgegeben und kommentiert von Barbara Wiedemann. – (suhrkamp taschenbuch 5105) – Berlin : Suhrkamp, 2000. (p. 848-849)
Du darfst
Entstehung: Paris, 16.10.1963. Am selben Tag entstanden Von Ungeträumtem, In die Rillen, In den Flüssen und wohl auch Vor dein spätes Gesicht. PC las das Gedicht am 24.7.1967 in Freiburg, am 18.12.1967 in Westberlin und wählte es für AG1.
Erstdruck in AK2, dort V. 1 als ganzer hervorgehoben.
Erläuterungen:
1 f. getrost | mit Schnee bewirten] Siehe V. 8 von Die Pole3. Die erotische Dimension zeigt PCs Widmung von AW4 an Ariane Deluz, »À Ariane, / neige et reneige / Paul«, die sich auf ein erotisches Erlebnis mit ihr im Schnee bezieht (Eisenreich5, S. 102, s.V. 9 von Wie die Tür, wie die Tür)6.
2 mit Schnee bewirten, 4 Maulbeerbaum, 5 schrie] Anspielung auf der Der Einsame.7 Im Garten von Moisville standen auf PCs Wunsch drei Maulbeerbäume (s. PC/GCL-frz.8 Abb. 49).
3 ich Schulter an Schulter] PCs Vorname Paul klingt an das frz. Wort für ›Schulter‹, ›épaule‹, an (s.V. 8 von Ô les hâbleurs9). Wohl nicht aktuell ist die Lektüre von Th. Pliviers Des Kaisers Kulis: »Hein Mathiesen steht Schulter an Schulter mit dem ›Admiral‹ im Krähennest«. (s. 51, Randmarkierung).10
———–
[1] Paul Celan: Ausgewählte Gedichte. Zwei Reden. Nachwort von Beda Allemann (edition suhrkamp 262), Frankfurt a.M. 1968
[2] Atemkristall
[3] Die Pole
sind in uns,
unübersteigbar
im Wachen,
wir schlafen hinüber, vors Tor
des Erbarmens,
ich verliere dich an dich, das
ist mein Schneetrost,
sag, daß Jerusalem ist,
sags, als wäre ich dieses
dein Weiß,
als wärst du
meins,
als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein,
ich blättre dich auf, für immer,
du betest, du bettest
uns frei.
[4] Atemwende
[5] Brigitta Eisenreich: Celans Kreidestern. Ein Bericht, Berlin 2010
[6] Wie die Tür, wie die Tür
tust du dich auf, immer, inmitten
der Mauern.
Mauern: steinerne
Lider, Menschen-
ort.
Wie
lange, sag,
lagen wir beide im Schnee?
Wie lange?
Denn, nicht wahr: Wir bleiben
weiß.
[7]DER EINSAME
Mehr als die Taube und den Maulbeerbaum
liebt mich der Herbst. Und mir schenkt er den Schleier.
»Nimm ihn zu träumen«, stickt er den Saum.
Und: »Gott ist auch so nahe wie der Geier.«
Doch hob ich auf ein ander Tüchlein auch:
gröber als dies und ohne Stickerein.
Rührst du’s , fällt Schnee im Brombeerstrauch.
Schwenkst du’s, hörst du den Adler schrein.
[8] Paul Celan – Gisèle Celan-Lestrange (1951-1970). Correspondance. Hg. v. Betrand Badiou und Eric Celan, [Paris] 2001
[9]Ô les hableurs.
n’en sois pas,
ô les câbleurs,
n’en sois pas,
l’heure, minutée, te seconde,
Eric. Il faut gravir ce temps.
Ton père
t’épaule.
[10] Plivier, Theodor: Des Kaisers Kulis. Roman der deutschen Kriegsflotte, Berlin 1930 (BPC11 Erwerbsdatum Mai 1953)
[11] Nachlaßbibliothek von Paul Celan, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (wenn nicht durch Zusatz gekennzeichnet)
@sh: interesting stuff ! Anything but “profound ambiguity”. Lots of spread-eagled snow angels (auf ein erotisches Erlebnis mit ihr im Schnee [bezogen]).
This book was (is?) extremely popular: https://www.amazon.de/Dativ-ist-dem-Genitiv-sein/dp/3462034480 . The result seems to be that many people (all journalists, for example) are afraid to use datives after prepositions. It’s not just Der Spiegel.
Yes, the author had a column in Spiegel. Many people used to admire the snarky high-horse style of that mag, i.e. were intimidated by it.
“Afraid to use datives after prepositions” – what a bunch of pussies. One problem, I’m pretty sure, is that they see only each other’s prose. If they got out less, and stayed home to read more widely, they could compare and contrast with more confidence, and possibly make up their own minds.
@sh: interesting stuff !
Seconded! Thanks for that.
I am ready to accept the lesser probability of the reading I brought into prominence. Gadamer, writing of this poem in a piece tellingly entitled “Who am I and who are you?”, leads up to his analysis with considerations like this: “The You is only so much and so little I as the I I is” (Heinemann and Krajewski translation). With interpreters like this, who needs obfuscators?
Most translations I have now consulted around the web (some published in print) accord “getrost” more weight than Stu would want, closer to my “boldly”. Below I offer a further iteration, in which I retain the precise syllable counts but have to surrender on the integrity of each line’s content. German word order defeats me on this point (would defeat anyone, I submit), especially when a German-final word commandeers the entire last line. My “surely” is a compromise between the web-wide strong understanding of “getrost” and Stu’s down-playing.
Me you can surely
gratify with snow!
Whenever I strode through summer
beside the mulberry tree there were squeals
from its youngest
leaf.
As a native speaker of German, I can confirm that Stu isn’t “down-playing”: he is essentially right. What is (necessarily) missing in all translations is the allusion to Trost (see Wiedemann’s commentary). This seems to have been one reason for Celan to use this adverb and not any synonym.
ulr:
As a native speaker of German, I can confirm that Stu isn’t “down-playing”: he is essentially right.
Fine. So “surely” is a happy compromise? It seems easily justified by the dictionary definitions. Heh, and Hebrews 13:6, for what it’s worth:
“So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.” [KJV]
“So können wir getrost sagen: Der Herr ist meine Hilfe, ich will mich nicht fürchten. Was will mir ein Mensch thun?” [Textbibel 1899]
What is (necessarily) missing in all translations is the allusion to Trost (see Wiedemann’s commentary).
And that is exactly what most translations I have looked at attempt to provide (for “Trost” meaning “comfort”, “consolation”, “solace”). I feel some of that in “surely” with its resonance of assuredness or security. “Safely” seems workable too.
The colon is strange. If it means what I think it means, I’m not sure I’ve seen this usage outside of English. Or is it a misscanned semicolon?
I’m afraid that’s your idiolect’s ideophone.
“Safely” works fairly well; “surely” much less so. “Boldly” is bizarre; it looks like the KJV and the Textbibel (…what a strange name…???) weren’t translated from exactly the same original.
Dank dem and trotz dem even seem to be dying out.
“Safely” works fairly well; “surely” much less so.
That’s what I would have thought, David M. I was trying too hard to accommodate what I took to be Stu’s concern. I’ll now boldly adopt “safely” (which in fact I hear as akin to “boldly” in any case: Stu’s “a reassuring particle meaning ‘not to worry’ ” seems like “not to fear”, which seems like “boldly” to me):
Me you can safely
gratify with snow!
Whenever I strode through summer
beside the mulberry tree there were squeals
from its youngest
leaf.
I see no reason to think that’s what Celan intended
Noetica’s reading is clear and makes sense. Maybe Celan avoided quotation marks to preserve the ambiguity but if the leaf is not being quoted we are simply confronted with the horror image of leaves screaming into the void.
Probably not. The colon is in both editions of Wiedemann’s kommentierte Gesamtausgabe (2003 and 2018), and also in an earlier (2000) paperback edition of the Gesammelte Werke.
The text seems to be the same (although the KJV is based on the notoriously corrupt Textus Receptus), but there seem to be different traditions of translating Greek θαρρἐω: Bauer/Aland has “guten Mutes, zuversichtlich sein”, whereas Barclay M. Newmans Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament translates “be full of courage; act boldly; be confident”. On the face of it, a slight difference, but in actual translation it results in the incompatible translations “getrost” (also in the 1964 Lutherbibel, but not in Luther’s original version) and “boldly”.
One issue is that German tends to use modifying adverbs and particles much more often than English, so using them in an English translation because they’re there in German tends to endow them with more strength than they have in German.
An idiomatic translation for the du kannst getrost in the poem would be “feel free to”.
Noetica’s reading is clear and makes sense.
It doesn’t make sense to me, and it doesn’t sound like Celan. I’ve just been looking at a bunch of his poems and can’t find any that work that way; he tends to be clear about who’s talking in a poem. Example, from this set of online translations:
The original:
Ich weine: Dein Haar ist nicht braun, sie bieten das Wasser der See, und du gibst ihnen Locken
This is weird:
# I weep: Your hair is not brown, they offer Salt-Waves of the
Sea, and you give them spume. #
Is Locken another “out-of-place” word that must be corrected ? “The ocean doesn’t expect non-brown curls, if anything it expects spume, so that must be what C. meant”.
Anyway, all this fuss just because the lady’s hair is not brown ?!
I emend the line free of charge:
Ich meine: dein Herr ist kein Zaun, sie bieten die See zum Verkauf, und du gibst ihnen Flocken
The “lady” is Celan’s mother, shot in a concentration camp during the winter 1942/3. Compare the other poems in Mohn und Gedächtnis (the Todesfuge among them: “dein goldenes Haar, Margarete / dein aschenes Haar, Sulamith”).
Alex K.: It’s a pity that the “Maul” of “Maulbeerbaum” gets lost in translation
I didn’t even understand this comment until I looked up the Gadamer essay that Noetica mentioned: as Gadamer points out, Maul in German is ‘mouth of an animal’ (no etymological relation to Maulbeere). So if it’s punningly a “mouth”-berry tree, then it makes more sense that it’s screaming!
But Gadamer’s first reason that it matters that it’s a mulberry and not just any tree is:
Is that true, botanically? I couldn’t immediately find anything about it.
Celan reading “Du darfst”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dpRbzvDM1E
I find the Nazi Heidegger talking about Celan simply obscene.
Celan reading “Du darfst”
Great find! (And I agree about Heidegger.)
@sh: Many thanks! Wiedemann’s comments, especially the poems she cites, help us get a feel of what’s beneath the surface of the words.
@Vanya: “…we are simply confronted with the horror image of leaves screaming into the void.” Not necessarily into the void – at/to the one walking by the mulberry’s side. And why not? It only takes a couple steps from Heine’s talking flowers (1822-23) to screaming leaves.
@ulr: The “lady” is Celan’s mother, shot in a concentration camp during the winter 1942/3. Compare the other poems in Mohn und Gedächtnis (the Todesfuge among them: “dein goldenes Haar, Margarete / dein aschenes Haar, Sulamith”).
Yes, I thought about those last lines of Todesfuge in this connection. I weighed whether to speculate on a “hair thing”, but decided not to overdo the silly remarks. Having his mother’s death now sprung on me makes me more cautious for the future, but not remorseful. How was anyone to guess that ?
A Laplacian intelligence (“… Rien ne serait incertain pour elle, et l’avenir, comme le passé, serait présent à ses yeux.”) can never offend out of ignorance. I wonder if this has been remarked on before.
Oh. Oh! Yeah, that explains it.
ktschwarz:
So if it’s punningly a “mouth”-berry tree, then it makes more sense that it’s screaming!
Not only does Maul mean the mouth of an animal, maulen means to groan, mumble, or moan complaining. A suitable baseline for the Schrei of the youngest leaf, which I have rendered as “squeal”.
θαρρἐω etc.
I still have difficulty seeing any problem with “boldly” for getrost, if Trost is all positivity and comfort. Collins explains adverbial getrost like this (my square-bracketed glosses):
1. (= vertrauensvoll [trustingly]) confidently
getrost sterben to die in peace
2. (= bedenkenlos [without hesitation])
wenn er frech ist, darfst du ihn getrost in sein Zimmer schicken if he’s naughty, feel free to or don’t hesitate to send him to his room
du kannst dich getrost auf ihn verlassen you need have no fears about relying on him
man kann getrost behaupten/annehmen, dass … one need have no hesitation in or about asserting/assuming that …
Trustingly, without hesitation, having no fears … sounds like “boldly” to me. A question of weight rather than of sense.
maulen means to groan, mumble, or moan complaining.
In everyday speech, describing the behavior of an adult person, maulen is used where “grouse”, “carp” or “bellyache” (also “moan” in one of those senses, not as one dying does, or a ghoul) can be a suitable English equivalent. Depends on the context (“c’est selon“, as I recently learned).
Trustingly, without hesitation, having no fears … sounds like “boldly” to me. A question of weight rather than of sense.
But the weight is the point; as I said above; using weighty descriptions like “Trustingly, without hesitation, having no fears” for something that is as bleached as getrost feels totally overblown. It’s like someone would make a song and a dance about how “feel free” invoked freedom, liberty, liberation when translating into German. Therefore, if you don’t want to go for “feel free”, then a more bleached word like “safely” is better.
Excellent. Thank you. My next iteration respects what I still accept as the original’s ambiguity. Whether it was intended or not, on careful consideration and fortified by responses here to my own first take, I say it is a genuine feature of the poem. Celan’s speaking of the poem (linked above) has just the right light emphasis on “schrie” to support my first impressions and the ambiguity hypothesis. I know enough about the German – particularly the word order – and about Celan’s other productions to give me confidence. Let no one imagine that there is no action with consonants. These need sensitive deployment in any English emulation. Note that the exact wording of the first two lines occurs in another of his poems, equally shrouded in semantic and syntactic snowmist. My current thinking, using Celan’s punctuation and still counting syllables, relies on a little syntactic freedom to get by. Why should translators be hobbled any more tightly than the artists they translate?
Me you may safely
gratify with snow:
whenever I strode through summer
side by side with the mulberry tree then
squealed its youngest
leaf.
I like that a lot.
Yes, now you’re cookin’ ! Only natural ingredients.
I agree. I missed maulen because it’s so far from my active vocabulary.
Boldness contains aggression and courage. Both of these are absent from getrost, which instead expresses the complete lack of a need for courage (or indeed for fear in the first place).
DM:
Boldness contains aggression and courage.
Fine, of course. I gather you don’t agree with Hans: “But the weight is the point; as I said above; using weighty descriptions like ‘Trustingly, without hesitation, having no fears’ for something that is as bleached as getrost feels totally overblown.” If boldness “contains” aggression rather than being merely often associated with it, this is more than a matter of weight. I disagree that aggression is essential to boldness. Certainly in my daily usage it is not. Perhaps courage is essential, but so what? How is courage radically different from confidence? In any case, we expect poetic usage to shift sometimes from everyday usage, often heightening it to bring out larger implications. A squealing-infant leaf is already “totally overblown” and unbleached. (What are literary as opposed to literal translators to do? Boldly go where no translator has gone before.)
Never mind. Most translations around the web make a big deal of this getrost, but I’m very happy to be advised by Hat’s local panel of German-speakers. “Safely” it is, and so far I see no reason to move to any further iteration.
One correction: The wording of the first two lines appears not to occur in any other poem, as I said it does. It occurs most misleadingly in a concoction by Blanchot. Tsk!
It snowed heavily in Minnesota last week and now it is bitterly cold. I took a walk this morning to hear the silence broken only by the chickadee and went into the woods around Pipestone Creek, a small river that heads into the Big Sioux (a river now highly polluted with slaughterhouse runoff), which then flows into the Missouri. I saw the bare branches of some chokecherry trees, the fruit of which is prized by the indigenous peoples of this region and called in Eastern Dakota čhaŋphá, Lakota and Western Dakota čhaŋpȟá, Ponca-Omaha ną́p’a and Chiwere ną́pha (all perhaps ultimately from a Proto-Siouan *yą ‘wood’ + *hpá ‘bitter’); Mandan katék; Hidatsa mááchiruwadu (‘berry with a bone’?, in reference to the large single seed?); Arikara nakaánus and Skiri Pawnee rakaáruc, ákaaruuc; Cheyenne menȯtse and Arapaho biino. I thought that the word chokecherry might reproduce some of the resonance between schreien and the Maul in Maulbeerbaum and allow Celan’s poem be reimagined/reimaged in the Anglophone American context. Using Stu Clayton’s rendering as a starting point:
For chokecherry as *‘bitter wood’ in Siouan, I was interested by this account of Hidatsa life by Buffalo Bird Woman, as recorded in Gilbert Livingston Wilson, Uses of Plants by the Hidatsa of the Northern Plains (published in 2014 but based on research done in 1916):
How is courage radically different from confidence?
I am confident that as long as I continue to work, $EMPLOYER will continue to pay me. This is not courage.
Well illustrated. Courage might be required to ask for a raise.
blood soup … so that it would smell of cherry flavor
Sounds great in principle. The next time I fry blood sausage, I’ll try a little cherry compote with it. I’ve never had blood soup, which I imagine might be too slimey for my liking.
I bet few people know that a pool of blood turns very fast into thin sheets of slime. Fact. I learned this two years ago when wiping one off the floor. My initial thought was that the sheets were mucuous membranes or something like that.
That’s by design, of course. For donor blood, the bag to be filled has a little citric acid (IIRC) in it to inhibit the coagulation — I think when sticking a pig, the usual method was to use a whisk to collect the platelets before they made the whole bucket gel.