Searching for the divine alterity and its poetic figurations in Paul Celan's die Niemandsrose

• Grant number: 18/07842-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2018
• End date: July 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Languages
• Principal Investigator: Helmut Paul Erich Galle
• Grantee: Fernanda Bender Gonçalves
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to go over the question of the figurations assumed by the divine - namely, the forms of poetic representation assumed by the religious element - on the first two cycles of Die Niemandsrose (1963), Paul Celan's fourth volume of poetry. The particularity of this task lays on some matters as, for example, this being the one work in which questions regarding judaism, that is, the religious and cultural aspect of the jewish faith, have gained a deeper profoundity over the author's thematic field. Demonstrating a great potencial towards referencial openness, the figurations which the divine takes on on the first two cycles of Die Niemandsrose manifest themselves under diversified, oscillating and even paradoxal formulations. Moreover, the plurarity of such figurations is, in a way, responsable for the fragmentation of an unified religious conception - the poet does not speak of an absolute divinity, instead he speaks of a manifold one. The observed result is a dialogical openness between faith, history and cultural context which, representing a significant portion of this work, does not cease to hand it its meaning. This research intends therefore to understand the various figurative abstractions which pervade this work's cyclic construction, placing them on Die Niemandsrose context as a whole. Through the analysis of four poems - (1) "Es war Erde in ihnen", (2) "Psalm", (3) "Radix, Matrix" and (4) "Benedicta" -, the chosen method to work this problematic was, for the time being, to limit such figurations to the symbolic, thus multidimensional, sphere, and, in this manner, to explore the different natures that seem to construct it. In a more detailed way, I'll seek to emphasize the relationship, in the poems, between man and his conception of the divine. This perspective seems relevant to me, insofar as there seems to be, in this work, an increasing search for the Other; a search which, to some extent, I'll try to understand whether it has or not anything to do with the due presence - imagetic, vocative, semantical etc. - of this manifold divine element.