This panel is designed to create a conversation about the global translation and reception of Paul Celan’s work, focusing on the Middle East as a particularly meaningful locus on this broader map. Jeff Sacks discusses the Iraqi poet Khālid al-Ma‘ālī’s 1999 volume of a selection of translations of the poetry and prose of Celan, which he reads alongside al-Ma‘ālī’s Arabic poetry; Kristin Dickinson looks at German-Turkish author Zafer Şenocak, who references Celan in his reflections on life between languages and is in conversation with him as a translator; Matthew Johnson uncovers a forgotten history of Yiddish language Celan reception in Israel; and Na’ama Rokem reads the Hebrew translations that were prepared by Yehuda Amichai when Celan visited Jerusalem in 1969. Through this constellation of readings and translations, that visit, which took place sixty years ago and was Celan’s only journey to the Middle East, is seen in a different light, as is the broader question of the global reception of Celan’s work. While reception has played a considerable role in the scholarship on Paul Celan, it has tended to focus on languages and places of biographical significance, such as Romania, where he was born, France, where he spent most of his adult life, or the Russian and German literary spheres. Celan’s Hebrew and Yiddish readerships might also belong in this same list, since these were both languages that the author knew and used. But for the purpose of our conversation, we choose to locate Israel in the Middle East, looking for less expected intersections in the reception history and trying to imagine encounters enabled by his poetry.

The term ‘encounter’ is culled from Celan’s poetics and it is often called upon in discussions of his own work as a translator. We draw on this trope, and, like many readers of Celan, attend to the paradoxical nature of the place where such encounters occur. Al-Ma‘ālī explains in his introduction to his translations that “the poems of Celan are characterized by an excessive difficulty” and, as Sacks argues in his paper, one aspect of this “difficulty” is that, in Celan, “I,” overburdened in language, is discombobulated as a gathering locus for sense. Sacks offers a reading of “world” in Celan through a reading of al-Ma‘ālī’s Arabic translation of “Welchen der Steine Du Hebst” (“Whichever Stone You Lift”), considering this translation in relation to al-Ma‘ālī’s rendering of several passages in “The Meridian” and several poems of al-Ma‘ālī’s. In this reading of both authors, the world is not a ground for language or its sense but only an unending displacement of the binding of language, and of relation, to the stabilizing imperatives of the modern state form and its interpretive terms—among them the word “I.” Attending to a related difficulty and destabiliziation in his essay “Opening Language,” Zafer Şenocak describes language learning as “a touch of consciousness” akin to bodily contact, which can generate feelings of warmth, but also coldness and pain. This emphasis on pain resonates strongly with the essay’s opening quotation from Paul Celan: "Into an openness, where language can lead to encounter," which suggests that language has the potential to become a radically destabilizing factor in one’s identity. Like Celan’s depiction of poetry as a Flaschenpost—or a message in a bottle—it envisions a poetic language en-route to the openness of an as-yet-unknown encounter. Taking the image of the Flaschenpost as a point of departure, Dickinson’s paper explores keys points of contact between the poetry of Paul Celan and Zafer Şenocak, as well as Şenocak’s translations of the Anatolian mystic Yunus Emre (1238–1320), whose poetry he regards as rendering “an alienating view of his own person.” If Şenocak describes himself as having followed Celan to the point “where my roots got lost,” Dickinson reads the intersections of Celan, Emre, and Senocak’s poetry not as a locatable point where the German and Turkish languages meet, but rather where the “roots” of these languages “get lost.”

The final two papers both do begin with concrete, locatable places: the city of Rehovot, a few miles south of Tel Aviv, where cultural activist and pedagogue Hersch Segal delivered a series of unpublished Yiddish-language lectures about Celan in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Jerusalem apartment of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, where Celan conducted an interview with the Israeli radio in 1969. Both of these locations, however, are also places where languages are brought into complex, destabilizing interactions. Segal’s lectures delineate the function of Yiddish in Celan’s poetry and prose and contend with the fraught relation between language and identity in his work. Johnson shows that for Celan’s Yiddish-language readers his writing in German - perceived to have been “corrupted” or “wounded,” – was a problem, which they addressed by re-imagining the relation between German and Yiddish. In the context of the larger reception, the paper thus interrogates the poet Chava Rosenfarb’s striking claim, published in Tel Aviv in 1994, that “[w]ith strength, [Celan] sought to distance the German language from the language of his murderers, as if he had attempted to create an entirely different language […], to remake it into a language of human warmness, to knead into it the idiomatic characteristics of the Yiddish language – as if he had wanted to transform German into Yiddish.” For the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai, whose translations of Celan are the focus of Rokem’s paper, there is no comparable possibility for a breaking of borders between German and Hebrew. And yet, as Rokem demonstrates, his translation of the poem “Mandorla” brings into question the operation of “carrying across” involved in translation (literally described in the German übersetzen), staging instead a hall of mirrors to reflect the languages that face each other on the page. Rokem’s reading focuses in particular on the different possibilities for pointing at and translating a “here,” which like the “I” discussed by Sacks becomes a place in which to interrogate the demands posed by the modern state – in this case Israel – among them a demand for a single, stable language.