Vom Zuviel war die Rede, vom Zuwenig. Paul Celan in the Works of Mirosław Bałka

Abstract

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was perhaps, among the poets of the past century, the one whose influence on the figurative arts was most profound. However, when it comes to visual artists who illustrated, or were inspired by, his work, we find generally mentioned the German Anselm Kiefer, the Polish-American Daniel Libeskind, the Hungarian-German László Lakner, or even the Italians Giosetta Fioroni or Giuseppe Caccavale. Extraordinarily important, however, is the presence of Celan in the work of Mirosław Bałka. Generally regarded as Poland’s greatest figurative artist/sculptor, Mirosław Bałka (b. 1958), in a recent interview with Friederike Günther (Friederike Günther interviews Miroslaw Balka, 02.03.2023, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin), speaks openly about a relationship that his admirers and connoisseurs have always known about, namely his almost amicable bond with Paul Celan. Celan’s poetry, says the artist, has been known to me since 1990 (the first translations into Polish of the poet from Czernowitz, by Ryszard Krynicki, appeared as early as 1972) and has been with me ever since, even when I do not mention it explicitly. This article will therefore attempt to account, at least in part, for the multiple presence of Celan in the works of the Polish artist: from direct quotation, as first in Me Reading Lichtzwang of 2011, to which the largest part of this text is dedicated. The use of black and white empty space also marks some of the affinities between the sculptor and the poet. The presence of Celan’s “person” and work is also bound, in Bałka, with the question of the use of the German language, which has, in this author, a singular two-faced aspect. Not only does German carry the echo of war and extermination, not only is it the essentially incomprehensible and foreign, ‘non-Polish’ language par excellence. German, thanks to the many lexical borrowings in the field of craftsmanship, also has, for Bałka (whose father and grandfather were stonemasons) the sound of a familiar language, and symbolises the ethics and dedication to work, including manual work, to which this artist is so attached.