A poetic of silence: trauma, representation and language in Escape from Death, by Paul Celan

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2014v19n2p107

Paul Celan’s poem Escape from death presents situations lived by himself in a Nazi concentration camp, which inserts the poem in the context of the literature of testimony; it is a poem fulfilled with high amount of drama, in which content and structure combine to offer a dense reading, loaded with meaning. One can see, in the poem, that silence dominates the scenery, expressing, through the many gaps left by a fragmentary language, what is difficult for the poet to express, the feelings which are impossible to talk about, what leads the reader to an astonishing feeling, making contact with the meaning only through stages and amid the gaps. This article approaches the poem starting from concepts related to Literature of testimony and the impossibility of representing the real (Roland Barthes); in what concern the formal aspects, beside the Bakhtin’s ideas about polyphony, and Barros and Fiorin’s studies about dialogism, polyphony and interdiscursivity; furthermore, starting from the musical concept of escape, as suggested by the title of the poem and highlighted in the text, we discuss figurative language – metaphor and metonymy, irony and ellipses, as the author's strategies to face the hesitation between trauma and representation so one have a silence poetic, in which the ellipses and metaphors play an essential role.