Something from Late Celan: The Commentary: Ichten

Googled around before bed and ended up at a link I'd posted over a year ago on a commentary re Celan's "Todtnauberg": Forgotten (I don't believe I ever read it all the way through), or never knew?, it was by Pierre Joris. Though we can talk about "over-translating" (Joris typically picks through the universe of possibilities), I think that poem is certainly one of Celan's best "buried treasures." Seemingly not even Heidegger--the Thinker himself--fully understood all the poem's dark plantings.

Anyway, though there's tons I could relay, in reading Joris' commentaries on Celan's late poems, I've become enamored with the verb ichten:

     ichten / I'ed: Several interpretations -- per direct indication by the poet -- point to the verb ichten (in the Grimms's Worterbuch, an important helper of Celan's compositional process), used here in the preterit and defined as "ich' sagen, eine frage mit ich beantworten" (to say "I," to the answer a question with I). The extraction of ichten from the preceding word "vernichtet"/"annihilated" is not as obvious in the English "I'ed" -- though maybe the two i's of "annihilated" do point to this origin.



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