THE POETIC CON-TEXT(S) PAUL CELAN'S POEM "UNLESBARKEIT"

The paper debates certain fundamental methodological dilemmas of literary studies re-presented by a confrontation with the complexity of the poetic language of Paul Celan (1920-1970). Upon the basis of the initial attempt at an interpretation of the poem "Unlesbarkeit" ("Unreadability"), written in the year 1968, later included in the posthumously published collection Schneepart (Snow-Part; 1971), the author outlines the principal possibilities of contextual understanding, which take into account not only the concrete biographical and historiographical circumstances, but also, through the methods of textual criticism and literary science, the wider auto-poetological, comprehensive circumscription of the poet's creativity. The designated interpretive con-textual crossroads direct the subsequent deliberation towards the discussion of hermeneutical experience, to which-in his writings and in the encounter with Celan's poetry-Hans-Georg Gadamer dedicated central and specific attention. In the confrontation with a literary text, the movement of interpretation opens up the inter-space of an "in-between" of understanding, wherein the usage of scientific methodical approaches of literary studies and/or humanistic knowledge can claim legitimacy only, if it contributes to the experience of a poetic text, to the reading of its sense.