ABSTRACT
Proposing a transnational poetics that joins Robert Creeley and Paul Celan is tantamount to claiming that the work of bridging or linking implied by the term "transnational" is possible even in the absence of many of the categories by which texts and writers have been considered fit for comparative work. Bypassing the language of comparison, then, my reading of the transnational poetics of Celan and Creeley depends on three idiosyncratic terms generated by Celan, Derrida, and the translator Jean Daive, respectively: incomparability, singularity, and proximity. This chapter sketches out an argument for respecting what Celan called the incomparability of his poems. It simultaneously pursues links between Celan and Creeley as evidence of the "proximity" affirmed by their shared translator, Jean Daive. The chapter argues that the techniques of poetic stuttering by which each poet responds to distinctly figured destructions, those of the Holocaust and of one's poetic precursors, outline a transnational post-war poetic orientation.
