On “Todesfuge”

When it comes to poetry, I believe very strongly that form facilitates emotion. Content is critical, of course, but how a poem is made—its rhythms, sounds, and pacing—is primarily responsible for how we feel a poem. And feeling a poem, like feeling a song, is one of the great human experiences. “Todesfuge” is an extraordinary poem because it makes us feel a cacophony of emotions that transcend easy understanding.

I have read and taught this poem for over two decades, but I was always aware that I was encountering a translation. The experience was a bit like reading subtitles. So, I have tried to create an English version that makes us feel confusion, relentlessness, and terror while simultaneously allowing us to feel the intoxicating rhythms and sounds of Celan’s lyric, to be overwhelmed by the incantatory, the purgative, power of poetry.

So, I foreground rhythms and sounds and cadences that accentuate the poem’s lyric pressure. I want readers to feel its music. One small example is the famous opening line: “Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends,” which is most commonly translated as “Black milk of morning we drink it in the evening.” But, my ear (and my heart) prefer “Black Milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk.”

It is true that abend in English is evening. But, evening in English is more casual than abend in German. Dusk just feels darker. Heavier. And this is a heavy poem. Also, in the German, trinken (drink) and abends both carry two syllables and form a slant rhyme. Drink and evening don’t click like drink and dusk. The alliteration of the D sounds in drink and dusk do similar work in English as trinken and abends in German. Additionally, the hard K sounds of drink and dusk resonate with the hard K of Black and milk in much the same way that Schwarz and abends talk to each other with their S sounds. To me, “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk” sets a stage, creates a mood, and establishes a rhythm most akin to the work Celan’s opening does in the original German.

As a poet, it is important to me to honor Celan’s commitment to the poem’s music. In my mind, the horror of the content of Celan’s poem is made more horrific through the juxtaposition of the poem’s sonic strangeness. My job is to help facilitate that experience for readers in English of this masterful poem.