Breathturn is the name of a collection by the poet Paul Celan.

Paul Celan was Romanian poet who survived the Holocaust and then went on to write poetry in German, primarily while living in France.

In 2004 or 2005, I picked up a copy of a selected poems (or perhaps collected poems) of Celan. I tried to read it, but nothing quite took hold. In short, I didn’t get it. I don’t know where that copy is now. Breathturn I bought at Bridgestreet Books in DC, on the edge of Georgetown, and this time something clicked. I got it.

Breathturn is the collection where the poet turned (pun intended) to the dense, brief, elliptical, neologism-heavy style for which is known. Short, broken lines, compound words split over two lines, and that constant elliptical and abstruse meaning.

The Holocaust hangs over everything, it seems – or maybe we, his readers, hang the Holocaust over all his work.

He committed suicide and one can’t help but attribute it to the survivor’s guilt that took the life of the great Italian writer, Primo Levi (who noted that no one in the camps survived, as he did, without, in effect, someone else dying in their place).

Anne Carson wrote a book about Celan called Economy of the Unlost. In part, it asks how some poets measured the value of the dead.

Celan’s poems always seem to hint at some broken past – a lost landscape, as well a body (the poet’s body) lost by virtue of the alteration of the body.

Others have noted the way that Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne drew on the work and tradition of Celan in his own poems that very directly force the reader to scramble for a meaning that is always just out of reach.

Below is an example of Celan’s work from Breathturn.

ERODED by
the beamwind of your speech
the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-
experienced-my hundred-
tongued perjury-
poem, the noem

Hollow-
whirled.
free
the path through the men-
shaped snow,
the penitent's snow, to
the hospitable
glacier-parlours and -tables

Deep
in the timecrevasse,
in the
honeycomb-ice
waits a breathcrystal,
your unalterable
testimony.