The Meridian Line: Writing and Visuality in Paul Celan escritura y visualidad en Paul Celan

Abstract

This article interrogates the intersection between writing and visuality in Celan’s poetics, based on the following route: a first section focuses on the impact of his encounter with Gisèle Lestrange, giving an account of Celan’s recognition of the significant imprint that Lestrange’s art of engraving leaves on his own poetic exercise. The growing use of terms from the art of engraving, both in his poetry and in his poetological reflections, will allow us to understand the relationship that the poet maintains with certain forms of critical imagination coming from the visual arts. In a second section, we trace how The Meridian, the title of her decisive poetological manifest, finds its space of germination in an engraving that Lestrange sends to Nelly Sachs, and in whose lines the poet recognizes, as in her correspondence with Celan, «meridians of the pain and consolation». A third section takes up Derrida’s question regarding how to read the practice of language carving in Celan. A final section succinctly addresses the relationship between image and resistance, based on the drawing of burning candles that Celan made as a child and the «call to poets» that he received from the anarchist Gustav Landauer.