Bistriţa owes its fame to Count Dracula. Not to the historical count, Vlad the Impaler, whose coffin is on display in Sighişoara, but to the invented one, the vampire in Bram Stoker’s novel (in which, however, the town is named Bistritz, after the German manner). However, I am better protected than Jonathan Harker, Stoker’s hero, because Grandma Anka is immune to all nocturnal monsters, and to anyone in general who wants to make anyone else afraid.
The literary clockwork in Stoker’s novel is perfect, and reveals how seductive mechanisms can be. Besides this – and it is something that catches the interest of a traveller on the Danube – in Chapter Three Count Dracula sings the praises of the Székely, his own Hunnish tribe of border nomadic horsemen, for centuries on guard against the invasions of the Magyars, Lombards, Avars, Bulgars and Turks, and every one of them a nobleman because they are all equal in the saddle and avid for freedom. The Székely, at least since time immemorial, have been scarcely distinguishable from the Magyars. In recent years the Hungarian writer György Kovács and the Rumanian authoress Lucia Demetrius have portrayed these people in their novels. A collection of their folk-poetry, entitled Wild Roses, was published in 1863. Compared with the red of those roses, the blood which spurts so willingly in films and books about Dracula is simply coloured water.
According to Stoker’s novel, Dracula’s castle is close to the frontier of Bukovina, which is now Soviet territory. In 1865 Ferdinand Kürnberger, who in Vienna was the master of the Feuilleton, was expecting those remote, intact eastern provinces of the Hapsburg Empire to produce a fresh, brand-new literature, German in language but nourished by all the cultures of that Austro-Rumanian-Jewish-Russian-Ruthenian melting-pot. In the veins of the Austrians the virgin vines of Pruth must replace the bored, weary wine of the Rhine. This hope came true when the Empire which was to be refurbished from its eastern territories no longer existed. Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina, after 1918 became a lively, multi-racial literary centre, with such writers as Isik Manger, Rezzori, Alfred Margul-Sperber, Rose Ausländer, and others. In The Hussar Gregor von Rezzori, “homeless man” and “polyglot homme tout à faire”, as are his characters, has given voice, with an elusive, melancholy poetry, to the teeming ambiguity of that Babel, its ironical interplay of truth and of falsehood, swapping parts back and forth.
That world has vanished, and its greatest spokesman, Paul Celan, expressed the ultimate truth about that disappearance, that death and sudden speechlessness. Celan’s poetry is Orphic poetry pushed to the last extreme, a song which descends into night and into the realm of the dead, that melts into the blurry murmur of life and shatters every form, either linguistic or social, so as to find the magic, secret word which throws open the prison of history. In the most lofty parable of modern poetry the poet aims to be a redeemer, to take upon himself the evils of existence and to find once more the true names for things, which have been erased by the false language of communication. In the inextricable web of mediations which shroud the individual around, the poet is an anomalous creature who refuses to huddle down into the folds of that web, but struggles to tear through it and reveal the depths of being which it conceals. Often, as in the case of Hölderlin or of Rimbaud, the adventure is a deadly one, because beyond the net there is nothing, and the poet plummets into that nothingness.
Celan, also, sought for this “bottom non-bottom”, as we read in one of his very last poems. Born at Czernowitz in 1920, Celan committed suicide in Paris in 1970. He experienced the holocaust of the Jews, in which his parents perished, as night in the most absolute sense, which annihilates any possibility of history or of real life, and later on he had to face the impossibility of putting down roots in Western civilization. It has been said that in himself he sums up a century of European poetry, born from that cleavage between reality and the individual, while also expressing those dreams of redeeming the world and destroying himself in this depiction of his own martyrdom.
His poetry leans out over the brink of silence. It is a word torn from wordlessness and flowering from wordlessness, from the refusal and impossibility of false, alienated communication. His arduous lines, cast into the boldest of lexical and syntactical formulations, are all woven of these negations, these denials, in which are expressed the only possible authenticity of feeling.
Celan experienced his own laceration, and the holocaust, as absolute evil. This evil, however, does not exist, and Eric Weil was perfectly correct to put us on our guard against its Medusa-like seductions. Even the most atrocious act has historical – and therefore relative – links with reality as a whole. But at the instant in which it is experienced, evil is thought of as violence most absolute, and even reflection, which attempts to understand its causes and motives, cannot make one forget the instant in which it was undergone with total suffering, unless the mind is willing to warp itself into a philistine reconciliation, which takes the edge off the sorrow and prevents a genuine understanding of the tragedy.
Celan, with searing immediacy and no trace of any reassuring conceptual mediation, puts himself on the side of the vanquished. He is probably the last Orphic poet, a religious reformer of Orphic poetry, bringing it to a blinding, primeval purity before it is snuffed out. For a century those radical linguistic and existential negations constituted a form of real resistance to social alienation. Now they are no longer scandalous, but have become precious objects of scandal. Anyone who trod that path today, even with personal integrity, would (according to an observation by Tito Perlini) in all probability face a pathetic destiny, all too easily absorbed by the mechanisms of alienated communication. Nevertheless, in Celan we are aware of this basic, deep-rooted renunciation, the gesture of one who puts an end to a tradition and at the same time erases himself.
Plato’s condemnation of poetry is unacceptable but we are forced to come to terms with it. That sort of poetry which asks its salvation only of itself runs the risk of being satisfied with miming the contradictions, the distresses and perhaps the banalities of a person’s own real state of mind, things which according to Plato make it impossible to pursue the quest for what is true and just. No one today, of course, can experience the problem as Plato experienced it, but poetry which feeds only on itself can even be a sin against poetry. Like rhymed quatrains and elaborate verse forms, even fragments of words groping in the darkness can repeat and regenerate themselves infinitely out of their own torment, turning to rhetoric, however lacerated that rhetoric might be. Celan’s sacrifice is also the exorcism of this danger. Impossible conviction urged him to fall silent and to vanish, having left his “message in a bottle” to any contemporaries or descendants. Celan vanished in the night-time, into the waters of the Seine where he sought death. One of his lines reads, “I shed light behind me.” Poetry is that dazzle which shows where he, with his poems, has vanished to.