Paul Celan and the Diaper Rash

Speaking of autobiography in poetry. I've long been fascinated by a little translation problem in one of Celan's earlier poems that to me at least, seems to highlight the nature of one person experiencing one's own autobiography both on and off the page. I'm only going to look at one line of the poem, however, and then look at both the Hamburger and Felstiner translations and then try to discover if an alternative is necessary or possible.

Suffice it to say that Celan, of Jewish Romanian descent, lost his parents to deportation and a mass grave in the Ukraine. His first collection, Poppy and Memory, frequently references his mother and the poem I'm looking at is no exception. (The poem begins "Espenbaum, dein Laub blickt weiss ins Dunkel.")

The line I'm really interested in comes in three formats. The original: Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei.

The Michael Hamburger translation: My mother's heart was ripped by lead.

And the John Felstiner translation: My mother's heart was hurt by lead.

The problem I think this line of poetry presents is that it attempts to combine both singularity of motion (like lead, which in German can also signify munitions and therefore here can stand in for the bullet that killed Celan's mother, who has already been mentioned in the poem) with the plurality of motion necessary to produce a condition like that denoted by the German word 'wund.' Basically, that lead is not ripping the mother's heart, but constantly rubbing it, causing an abrasion. It's a sore that won't go away, that is perhaps intensified by memory.

Here's my literal translation of the line, "Meiner Mutter Herz ward wund von Blei."

The first three words indicate the genitive case and mean' the heart of my mother. 'ward' is a literary form of the past tense of 'to be.' 'Von Blei' just means 'from lead' but can also signify a bullet, munitions, etc. 'Wund' is the interesting word for me here and my first inclination is to translate it not as 'ripped' or 'hurt' but as 'raw,' as a condition caused by constant chafing.

When I was a nanny in Munich, for example, the mother of the twins I looked after said to me that ""sein Po ist ganz wund," to indicate that one of the children had diaper rash. (That just means 'his but is really raw,' or something like that.)

When I look 'wund' up in the German-English dictionary, I am told the word means 'sore.' Other words pop up through the examples listed, words like 'raw,' 'chafed,' etc. When I look up 'wund' in the German Duden, I find among other things, an allusion to a wound gotten from rubbing against skin.

My original temptation has always been to translate the line as "My mother's heart worn sore by lead," but I am not really sure if this is fixing the problem, either, if this highlights how a pretty singular motion like a bullet could produce a chafe.

What I really want to do is rewrite the line as "My mother's heart worn sore the bullet," because that's the syntax and juxtaposition I would use in a poem if I wrote it. Or actually, "My mother's heart worn raw the bullet," because the sounds of 'worn raw' seem to have the same angles as 'ward wund,' if one can speak of sounds having angles. Actually, I really go back and forth between sore and raw. Is it a sacrilege to rewrite Celan in my own image and call it translation? It seems like everyone and their brother does it to Hoelderlin. The process seems strangely thrilling.

(Of course, there's also something soft and repetitive about lead. Maybe Hamburger has it right, after all. It's the bullet that is multiple, the heart singular.)