Summer Was Already Gone: Celan, Shakespeare and Zionism in Translation

I like Celan’s Shakespeare best just as I like Blunts’ Ye best or Tsai Ming-liang’s Truffaut. Celan’s Shakespeare is a possessive re-making during the time of the Goll affair as if to find another frame, another language separate to his to say himself back from the outside—brink writing, back from the brink verse. Celan drags the sonnets through the “thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech” (his own phrase about language after the camps) so that Shakespeare’s elegant carpe diem on time and beauty turns into something fractured and winter-hardened. The “Verfinsterungen” (darkenings) in Sonnet 5 carry the weight of full eclipse, of history’s blackouts, even of a passive second holocaust to come. Summer doesn’t gently fade; it was, already gone. Summer was, he says. The distillation of beauty becomes almost a survivor’s dirty trick against oblivion.

It’s a comparable negative glamor and thrill with Ye or what was even at the time—spring 2025—called Ye-I (Ye AI) filtered through Dave Blunts’ unbeatable sense of melody, the mortally obese as a stand-in for Ye-I’s extinct giveaway, or it’s comparable to Tsai Ming-liang slowing down and hollowing out Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague warmth into long, static, dripping durations of loneliness and quiet endurance. In each case, the later artist colonizes, translates, and makes the original speak in their own sacred idiom.

Shakespeare’s Celan feels more “Celan” than “Shakespeare,” just as Blunts’ slapstick hyper-anti-Zionist Nazi Ye feels like a strange, melodic counterpoint-mirror held up to the whole of Kanye’s career, a fulfilment of his earlier anti-gangsterism (The College Dropout). One thinks too of What Time Is It There? (2001), specifically the scene in which Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) lies in his dimly lit Taipei apartment, half-buried under a blanket, smoking and watching a bootleg VHS of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) on an old CRT television. This allows us to see Truffaut’s film better than the film itself does, through non-Western syn-thetic com-positioning.

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One observes, as a kind of seriously damaged but connected tangent, the ongoing trend in UK jurisprudence: courts (notably Inner London Crown Court under Judge Silas Reid) systematically banning or criminalizing specific words in activist trials—“climate change,” “climate crisis,” “fuel poverty,” “genocide,” “Israel”—when defendants or jurors might use them to explain motives or context. Climate activists (Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil) have been jailed for defying bans on naming the ecological danger; Palestine Action defendants face terrorism charges for damaging UK-based Israeli weapons factories (Elbit Systems) yet are barred from mentioning their target, motives, or the word “genocide,” with media also restricted. What has been happening begins to resemble automated correction of language itself: the state gathers (Ge-) every stellen (setting, challenging-forth, erecting) of speech into a legal standing-reserve where the danger (Gefahr—extinction, complicity in mass death) cannot be named as such. The real is corrected into unsayable Bestand.

Think again of Celan, and of the Goll affair (Claire Goll’s campaign, Celan’s Shakespeare translations, the “Dreyfus Affair” parallel), loss of the word that “remained with me” also in Celan, Kaddish, “my Jew’s spot / Judenlocke,” and Shakespeare again (Richard II: stripping of kingship, the “dangerous night”) or of Celan’s verlor ich ein Wort which mourns the extinction of the proper name. Shakespeare’s king stripped bare becomes the activist denuded of the word that would name the danger. Both are poetics of removal: the name extinguished, the function (protest, mourning, cognition of limit) corrected into almost absolute silence.

The word that would name the danger (Gefahr of extinction or complicity) is corrected out of the legal frame—an automated correction that erases protest-language so that the real (ecological collapse, arms complicity, dead children) cannot be challenged-forth as danger.

In Derrida Ge-stell itself is corrected as co-érection: correction—gathering erection (Aufstellung) into self-correcting threat that refuses return to originary Entbergen. The Anglo-Zionist legal machine automates it: the courtroom co-erects the frame by removing the word that would let danger show itself as danger. No devil, here, says Derrida—only the correction that straightens speech into silence so the real remains committed to Bestand (standing-reserve of unsayable facts).

The state weaponizes secrecy/censorship laws (Terrorism Act, contempt of court) to protect specific systems (Israeli arms supply, fossil infrastructure). The danger (extinction via climate, mass death via complicity) grows exactly where any naming of it should open a saving possibility. The correction prevents the word from remaining with us (das mir verblieben war). Civilization—that very thing which might know how to accept its own limits—is impossible because the word that would allow mutual cognition of having gone too far is corrected out. The danger grows where the saving power should grow.