Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan

An arresting memoir of the final years and tragic suicide of one of twentieth-century Europe’s greatest poets, published on the centenary of his birth.

＂Daive’s memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death.＂--The New Yorker

＂Jean Daive’s memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confrère of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century.＂--J.M. Coetzee

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is considered one of Europe’s greatest post-World-War II poets, known for his astonishing experiments in poetic form, expression, and address. Under the Dome is French poet Jean Daive’s haunting memoir of his friendship with Celan, a precise yet elliptical account of their daily meetings, discussions, and walks through Paris, a routine that ended suddenly when Celan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. Daive’s grief at the loss of his friend finds expression in Under the Dome, where we are given an intimate insight into Celan’s last years, at the height of his poetic powers, and as he approached the moment when he would succumb to the debilitating emotional pain of a Holocaust survivor.

In Under the Dome, Jean Daive illuminates Celan’s process of thinking about poetry, grappling with questions of where it comes from and what it does: invaluable insights about poetry’s relation to history and ethics, and how poems offer pathways into a deeper grasp of our past and present. This new edition of Rosmarie Waldrop’s masterful translation includes an introduction by scholars Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard, which provides critical, historical, and cultural context for Daive’s enigmatic, timeless text.

＂Under the Dome breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human necessity of poetry.＂--Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx

＂The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering of Jean Daive’s prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop, grab on and leave us haunted and speechless.＂--Mary Ann Caws, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry

＂Rosmarie Waldrop’s brilliant translation resonates with her profound knowledge of both Celan’s and Daive’s poetry and the passion for language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful collaboration.＂--Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On

＂Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celan’s question to Jean Daive as her own. I cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that contends with time.＂--Fady Joudah, author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance

＂Daive’s writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celan’s various enunciations, his linguistic humility. ... Celan’s death, what Daive calls ’really unforeseeable, ’ remains as an ’undercurrent’ in the conversations recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of true mourning and acknowledgement.＂--Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

Author of over fifteen collections of poetry and seven volumes of fiction, Jean Daive has been an important voice in French letters for over 35 years. His first book of poetry, Décimale blanche, published in 1967, received much attention; his subsequent volumes have often been ongoing, serial volumes--Narration d’équilibre, Trilogie du Temps, La Condition d’infini--each exploring a specific concept and/or formal question across three or more volumes. Daive’s work has received extensive critical attention both in full-length volumes and numerous articles. Also a translator, he has published translations of the poetry of Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Norma Cole, and others. Daive has also exerted great influence: during his decades of work in radio, as a producer at France Culture; as president of the Centre International de Poésieà Marseille (CiPM); and as the founder and editor of four successive poetry journals: Fragment in 1969, fig. in 1989, Fin in 1999, and K.O.S.H.K.O.N.O.N.G. in 2013. He lives and works in Paris.

Poet, translator, and editor Rosmarie Waldrop has been a forceful presence in American and international poetry for over forty years. Born in Germany in 1935, Waldrop studied literature and musicology before immigrating to the United States in the late 1950s. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966. While at the University of Michigan, Waldrop married poet and translator Keith Waldrop. In 1961 the Waldrops began Burning Deck Magazine. The magazine evolved into Burning Deck Press, one of the most influential publishers for innovative poetry in the United States. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since 1968 and she has taught at Wesleyan University, Tufts, and Brown. She has become the leading English translator of Edmond Jabès’s writing, translating over a dozen volumes of his work. In 1993 she was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for her translation of Jabès’s The Book of Margins, and was named ＂Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres＂ by the French government. Waldrop has authored over 20 books of her own writing, including poetry, fiction, and essays. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After practicing labor and employment-discrimination law for several years, Robert Kaufman returned to UC Berkeley to take a Ph.D. in English. He then joined the English Department faculty at McGill University in Montréal, moving soon thereafter to Stanford University, where he was assistant professor of English and affiliated assistant professor of German Studies and of Modern Thought and Literature. Kaufman has been a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, as well as a John Philip Coghlan Research Fellow, and has also spent terms teaching, as invited visiting assistant professor, in the University of Chicago’s English Department and UC Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Department. He joined Berkeley’s Comparative Literature faculty in July, 2007; at Berkeley he has been both a Hellman Family and Institute of International Studies Fellow. He also teaches in, and is a past Co-Chair of, UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Program in Critical Theory.

Philip Gerard received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019; he is currently a research fellow at the Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des littératures at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His article on Paul Celan’s reception of Ezra Pound appeared in the January 2020 issue of Modernism/modernity. Gerard is currently completing a book manuscript on postwar modernism that engages the poetics of Celan and Pound, contrasting the ways they develop the relations between translation and memory.