Selections

by Paul Celan

  you drop

  anchor, your shadow

  strips you off on the bush,

  arrival,

  descent,

  a chafer recognizes you,

  you are approaching

  each other,

  caterpillars

  spin you in,

  the Great

  Sphere

  allows you passage through,

  soon

  the leaf buttons its vein on to yours,

  sparks

  have to cross through

  for the length of a breath-need,

  you are entitled to a tree, a day,

  it decodes the number,

  a word with all its green

  enters itself, transplants itself,

  follow it

  I HEAR THE AXE HAS BLOSSOMED.

  I hear the place is unnamable,

  I hear the bread which looks at him

  heals the hanged man,

  the bread the woman baked for him,

  I hear they call life

  the only shelter.

  WITH THE VOICE OF THE FIELDMOUSE

  you squeak up,

  a sharp

  clamp,

  you bite through the shirt into my skin,

  a cloth,

  you slide across my mouth,

  midway through my

  words weighing you, shadow,

  down.

  IN LIZARD-

  skins, Epi-

  leptic one,

  I bed you, on the cornices,

  the gable-

  holes

  bury us, with lightdung.

  SNOWPART. arched, to the last,

  in the updraft, before

  the forever dewindowed

  huts:

  flatdreams skip

  over the

  chamfered ice;

  to carve out

  the wordshadows, to stack them

  around the cramp

  in the crater.

  ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

  FROM ZEITGEHOFT/TIMEHALO

  ALMONDING YOU, who only halfspoke,

  yet was trembled from the seed on up,

  you

  I let wait,

  you.

  And was

  not yet

  uneyed,

  as yet unthorned in the constellation

  of the song that begins

  star, the song that begins:

  Hachnissini

  IT STOOD

  on your lip : the figsplinter

  it stood

  around us : Jerusalem

  it stood

  above the Daneship:

  the bright-fir-scent, we thanked it,

  I stood

  in you.

  THE SWELTER

  adds us up

  in the ass's bray before

  Absalom's tomb, here too,

  Gethsemane, over there,

  the outflanked, whom

  does it bury?

  At the nearest gate nothing opens,

  above you, open one, I carry you toward me.

  WE WHO LIKE THE SEAOATS GUARD.

  in N'we Awiwim,

  the unkissed

  stone of a complaint

  swells up,

  before fulfillment,

  it palpates our mouths,

  it crosses

  over to us,

  alloyed to us

  in its Whiteness,

  we hand ourselves on:

  to you and to me,

  night, be careful, the sand-

  commanded

  is strict

  with us two.

  A RING. FOR BOWDRAWING.

  loosed after the wordswarm

  that founders behind the world,

  with the starlings,

  Arrowy one, when you whir toward me,

  I know from where,

  I forget from where.

  THE RADIANCE, yes, the one that

  Abu Tor

  saw riding toward us, when we

  orphaned into each other, for life,

  not only up from the wrists —:

  a goldbuoy, from

  temple-depths,

  surveyed the danger that

  slyly underlay us.

  NITIDOUS YOU

  tumor daughter

  of a blinding in the cosmos,

  seized

  by supracelestial search troops

  shunted

  into the seeing, god-

  waiving

  starheap Blue,

  you turn

  gamey

  before our

  hungry, immovable

  pores,

  an also-sun, between

  two brightshots

  abyss.

  COME, make the world mean with yourself

  come, let me fill you up with

  all that's mine,

  One with you I am,

  to capture us,

  even now.

  A BOOTFULL OF BRAIN

  set out in the rain:

  there will be a going, a great one,

  far across the borders

  they draw us.

  THE TRUMPET'S PART

  deep in the glowing

  Empty-text,

  at lamp's level,

  in the timehole:

  listen your way in

  mouthwise.

  THE POLES

  are in us,

  insurmountable

  while awake,

  we sleep across, to the Gate

  of Mercy,

  I lose you to you, that

  is my snow-comfort,

  say that Jerusalem is,

  say it, as if I was this

  your Whiteness

  as if you were

  mine,

  as if without us we could be we

  I leaf you open, forever,

  you pray, you lay

  us free.

  THE KINGSWAY

  behind the fake door,

  before it, deathed

  in by the counter-

  sign, the lionsign,

  the constellation, keel up,

  mired in,

  you, with the

  wound-fathoming

  eyelash.

  THERE ALSO

  comes a meaning

  down the narrowest cut,

  it is breached

  by the deadliest of our

  standing marks.

  I DRINK WINE

  from two glasses

  and harrow

  the king's caesura

  like that other

  does Pindar,

  God turns in the tuning fork

  as one of the small

  just ones,

  from the lottery drum falls

  our doit.

  SOMETHING SHALL BE.

  later,

  that fills itself with you

  and lifts itself

  to a mouth

  Out of shattered

  madness

  I raise myself

  and watch my hand

  as it draws the one

  single

  circle.

  NOTHINGNESS,

  for the sake

  of our names

  — they gather us in —

  seals,

  the end believes us

  the beginning,

  before the

  masters en-

  silencing us,

  in the undifferentiated, attesting

  itself: the clammy

  brightness.

  IN THE BELLSHAPE

  the

  believing-unbelieving

  souls gasp,

  star-nonsense

  propagates itself, even with my

  hand, in desert-sense en-

  duned by you,

  we got here

  long ago.

  AS I

  carry the ringshadow

  you carry the ring,


  something, used to heaviness,

  strains itself

  lifting us,

  infinite

  de-eternalizing you.

  STRANGENESS

  has netted us,

  transience reaches

  helplessly through us,

  take my pulse, it too,

  into yourself,

  then we shall prevail

  against you, against me,

  something enclothes us

  in dayskin, in nightskin,

  for the game with the highest, epi-

  leptic seriousness.

  ILLUMINATED,

  the seeds

  which I in you

  won swimming,

  rowed free,

  the names — they

  sail the straits,

  a blessing, up front,

  compacts into

  a weather-sensing

  fist.

  ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

  Previous page:

  Gisele Celan-Lestrange,

  etching, no. 11 in the series

  Schwarzmaut.

  CONVERSATION IN THE MOUNTAINS

  One evening, when the sun had set and not only the sun, the Jew — Jew and son of a Jew — went off, left his house and went off, and with him his name, his unpronounceable name, went and came, came trotting along, made himself heard, came with a stick, came over stones, do you hear me, you do, it's me, me, me and whom you hear, whom you think you hear, me and the other — so he went off, you could hear it, went off one evening when various things had set, went under clouds, went in the shadow, his own and not his own — because the Jew, you know, what does he have that is really his own, that is not borrowed, taken and not returned — so he went off and walked along this road, this beautiful, incomparable road, walked like Lenz through the mountains, he who had been allowed to live down in the plain where he belongs, he, the Jew, walked and walked. Walked, yes, along this road, this beautiful road.

  And who do you think came to meet him? His cousin came to meet him, his first cousin, a quarter of a Jew's life older, tall he came, came, he too, in the shadow, borrowed of course — because, I ask and ask you, how could he come with his own when God had made him a Jew — came, tall, came to meet the other, Gross approached Klein, and Klein, the Jew, silenced his stick before the stick of the Jew Gross.

  The stones, too, were silent. And it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, one and the other.

  So it was quiet, quiet up there in the mountains. But it was not quiet for long, because when a Jew comes along and meets another, silence cannot last, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and nature are strangers to each other, have always been and still are, even today, even here.

  So there they are, the cousins. On the left, the turk's-cap lily blooms, blooms wild, blooms like nowhere else. And on the right, corn-salad, and dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink, not far off. But they, those cousins, have no eyes, alas. Or, more exactly: they have, even they have eyes, but with a veil hanging in front of them, no, not in front, behind them, a moveable veil. No sooner does an image enter than it gets caught in the web, and a thread starts spinning, spinning itself around the image, a veil-thread; spins itself around the image and begets a child, half image, half veil.

  Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road in the mountains, the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause, an empty space between the words, a blank — you see all the syllables stand around, waiting. They are tongue and mouth as before, these two, and in their eyes there hangs a veil, and you, poor flowers, are not even there, are not blooming, you do not exist, and July is not July.

  The windbags! Even now, when their tongues stumble dumbly against their teeth and their lips won't round themselves, they have something to say to each other. All right then, let them talk .. .

  "You've come a long way, have come all the way here ..."

  "I have. I've come, like you."

  "I know."

  "You know. You know and see: The earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn't, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me — because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me — a language, well, without I and without You nothing but He, nothing but it, you understand, and She, nothing but that."

  "I understand, I do. After all, I've come a long way, I've come like you."

  "I know."

  "You know and you want to ask: And even so you've come all the way, come here even so — why, and what for?"

  "Why, and what for ... Because I had to talk, maybe, to myself or to you, talk with my mouth and tongue, not just with my stick. Because to whom does it talk, my stick? It talks to the stones, and the stones — to whom do they talk?"

  "To whom should they talk, cousin? They do not talk, they speak, and who speaks does not talk to anyone, cousin, he speaks because nobody hears him, nobody and Nobody, and then he says, himself, not his mouth or his tongue, he, and only he, says: Do you hear me?"

  "Do you hear me, he says — I know, cousin, I know... Do you hear me, he says, I'm here. I am here, I've come. I've come with my stick, me and no other, me and not him, me with my hour, my undeserved hour, me who have been hit, who have not been hit, me with my memory, with my lack of memory, me, me, me ..."

  "He says, he says ... Do you hear me, he says ... And Do-youhear-me, of course, Do-you-hear-me does not say anything, does not answer, because Do-you-hear-me is one with the glaciers, is three in one, and not for men . .. The green-and-white there, with the turk'scap lily, with the corn-salad ... But I, cousin, I who stand here on this road, here where I do not belong, today, now that it has set, the sun and its light, I, here, with the shadow, my own and not my own, I — I who can tell you:

  "I lay on the stones, back then, you know, on the stone tiles; and next to me the others who were like me, the others who were different and yet like me, my cousins. They lay there sleeping, sleeping and not sleeping, dreaming and not dreaming, and they did not love me, and I did not love them because I was one, and who wants to love One when there are many, even more than those lying near me, and who wants to be able to love all, and I don't hide it from you, I did not love them who could not love me, I loved the candle which burned in the left corner, I loved it because it burned down, not because it burned down, because it was his candle, the candle he had lit, our mothers' father, because on that evening there had begun a day, a particular day: the seventh, the seventh to be followed by the first, the seventh and not the last, cousin, I did not love it, I loved its burning down and, you know, I haven't loved anything since.

  "No. Nothing. Or maybe whatever burned down like that candle on that day, the seventh, not the last; not on the last day, no, because here I am, here on this road which they say is beautiful, here I am, by the turk's-cap lily and the corn-salad, and a hundred yards over, over there where I could go, the larch gives way to the stone-pine, I see it, I see it and don't see it, and my stick which talked to the stones, my stick is silent now, and the stones you say can speak, and in my eyes there is that moveable veil, there are veils, moveable veils, you lift one, and there hangs another, and the star there — yes, it is up there now, above the mountains — if it wants to enter it will have to wed and soon it won't be itself, but half veil and half star, and I know, I know, cousin, I know I've met you here, and we talked, a lot, and those folds there, you know they are not for men, and not for us who went off and met here, under the star, we the Jews who came like Lenz through the mountains, you Gross and me Klein, you, the windbag, and me, the windbag, with our sticks, with our unp
ronounceable names, with our shadows, our own and not our own, you here and me here —