The Post-National Celan: The Imperfect Triangulation from (Abandoned) Romanian Poetry to World Literature and Back

Abstract

This article focuses on the (dis)continuities between the German-language work of Paul Celan (integrated into a “large” literature where he becomes “Europe’s foremost poet after World War II”, in George Steiner’s opinion) and the scanty corpus of Romanian literature written by Celan in his Bucharest period, read in the post-national perspective. In his book Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age (2020), David Damrosch states that a unified Romanian literature should integrate literature written in several languages, disregarding the obsolete criterion of the national language. While agreeing with this proposition, the article remarks that Damrosch’s other theoretical proposition, that of the bifocal viewpoint, with the two foci represented by the literature of origin and that of insertion, proves ineffective in Celan’s case. The author proposes the use of “cultural triangulation”, Andrei Terian’s concept, for a better understanding of Celan as a post-national poet. In this model, Celan proves to be not a single poet but rather a network comprising all his possibilities of development in any language, intersecting possible (but abandoned) and accomplished versions of himself, writing in two languages (even not proportionately so), and absorbing and distributing biographical and cultural information from and to each of them.