Breathturn into Timestead

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by Paul Celan


  20. Hans Mayer, “Erinnerung an Paul Celan,” Merkur 24 (1970): 1160.

  21. Jerry Glenn, Paul Celan (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), p. 141.

  22. James K. Lyon, “Die (Patho-)Physiologie des Ichs in der Lyrik Paul Celans,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 106, no. 4 (1987b): 591–608.

  23. Werner Hamacher, “The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure Through Celan’s Poetry,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 276–314; reprinted in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, edited by Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 219–63.

  24. See, for example, the essay on Celan’s relation to the Gruppe 47 in Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan: Poetische Korrespondenzen, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Sigrid Weigel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997).

  25. Esther Cameron, “Erinnerung an Paul Celan,” in Werner Hamacher and Winfried Menninghaus, eds., Paul Celan (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), p. 339.

  26. This, and much other information in this section, is taken from volume 8, part 2, of the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, prepared by Bonner Arbeitsstelle für die Celan-Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991).

  27. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 228.

  28. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2005), 1–64.

  29. Die Gedichte: Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). This is the edition used throughout the present volume.

  30. Jean Bollack, “Pour une lecture de Paul Celan,” Lignes 1 (November 1987): 147–61.

  31. Paul Celan, letter to Vittorio Sereni (Mondadori), February 22, 1962 (copy), Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, D.90.1.3096.

  32. Celan, Meridian, p. 73.

  Breathturn

  I

  YOU MAY confidently

  serve me snow:

  as often as shoulder to shoulder

  with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,

  its youngest leaf

  shrieked.

  * * *

  BY THE UNDREAMT etched,

  the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland

  casts up the life mountain.

  From its crumb

  you knead anew our names,

  which I, an eye

  similar

  to yours on each finger,

  probe for

  a place, through which I

  can wake myself toward you,

  the bright

  hungercandle in mouth.

  * * *

  INTO THE FURROWS

  of the heavenscoin in the doorcrack

  you press the word

  from which I rolled,

  when I with trembling fists

  the roof over us

  dismantled, slate for slate,

  syllable for syllable, for the copper-

  glimmer of the begging-

  cup’s sake up

  there.

  * * *

  IN THE RIVERS north of the future

  I cast the net, which you

  hesitantly weight

  with shadows stones

  wrote.

  * * *

  BEFORE YOUR LATE FACE,

  a loner

  wandering between

  nights that change me too,

  something came to stand,

  which was with us once already, un-

  touched by thoughts.

  * * *

  DOWN MELANCHOLY’S RAPIDS

  past the blank

  woundmirror:

  There the forty

  stripped lifetrees are rafted.

  Single counter-

  swimmer, you

  count them, touch them

  all.

  * * *

  THE NUMBERS, in league

  with the images’ doom

  and counter-

  doom.

  The clapped-on

  skull, at whose

  sleepless temple a will-

  of-the-wisping hammer

  celebrates all that in

  worldbeat.

  * * *

  PATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK

  of your hand.

  From the four-finger-furrow

  I root up the

  petrified blessing.

  * * *

  WHITEGRAY of

  shafted, steep

  feeling.

  Landinward, hither

  drifted sea oats blow

  sand patterns over

  the smoke of wellchants.

  An ear, severed, listens.

  An eye, cut in strips,

  does justice to all this.

  * * *

  WITH MASTS SUNG EARTHWARD

  the sky-wrecks drive.

  Onto this woodsong

  you hold fast with your teeth.

  You are the songfast

  pennant.

  * * *

  TEMPLECLAMPS,

  eyed by your malar bone.

  Its silverglare there

  where they gripped:

  you and the rest of your sleep—

  soon

  will be your birthday.

  * * *

  NEXT TO THE HAILSTONE, in

  the mildewed corn-

  cob, home,

  to the late, the hard

  November stars obedient:

  In the heartthread, the

  knit of worm-talk—:

  a bowstring, from which

  your arrowscript whirrs,

  archer.

  * * *

  TO STAND, in the shadow

  of the stigma in the air.

  Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.

  Unrecognized,

  for you

  alone.

  With all that has room in it,

  even without

  language.

  * * *

  YOUR DREAM, butting from the watch.

  With the wordspoor carved

  twelve times

  helically into its

  horn.

  The last butt it delivers.

  In the ver-

  tical narrow

  daygorge, the upward

  poling ferry:

  it carries

  sore readings over.

  * * *

  WITH THE PERSECUTED in late, un-

  silenced,

  radiating

  league.

  The morning-plumb, gilded,

  hafts itself to your co-

  swearing, co-

  scratching, co-

  writing

  heel.

  * * *

  THREADSUNS

  above the grayblack wastes.

  A tree-

  high thought

  grasps the light-tone: there are

  still songs to sing beyond

  mankind.

  * * *

  IN THE SERPENTCOACH, past

  the white cypress,

  through the flood

  they drove you.

  But in you, from

  birth,

  foamed the other spring,

  up the black

  ray memory

  you climbed to the day.

  * * *

  SLICKENSIDES, fold-axes,

  rechanneling-

  points:

  your terrain.

  On both poles

  of the cleftrose, legible:

  your outlawed word.

  Northtrue. Southbright.

  * * *

  WORDACCRETION, volcanic,

  drowned out by searoar.

  Above,

  the flooding mob

  of the contra-creatures: it

  flew a flag—portrait and replica

  cruise vainly timeward.

  Till you
hurl forth the word-

  moon, out of which

  the wonder ebb occurs

  and the heart-

  shaped crater

  testifies naked for the beginnings,

  the kings-

  births.

  * * *

  (I KNOW YOU, you are the deeply bowed,

  I, the transpierced, am subject to you.

  Where flames a word, would testify for us both?

  You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)

  * * *

  ERODED by

  the beamwind of your speech

  the gaudy chatter of the pseudo-

  experienced—the hundred-

  tongued perjury-

  poem, the noem.

  Evorsion-

  ed,

  free

  the path through the men-

  shaped snow,

  the penitent’s snow, to

  the hospitable

  glacier-parlors and -tables.

  Deep

  in the timecrevasse,

  in the

  honeycomb-ice

  waits, a breathcrystal,

  your unalterable

  testimony.

  * * *

  II

  BY THE GREAT

  Eye-

  less

  scooped from your eyes:

  the six-

  edged, denialwhite

  erratic.

  A blind man’s hand, it also starhard

  from name-wandering,

  rests on him, as

  long as on you,

  Esther.

  * * *

  SINGABLE REMNANT—the outline

  of him, who through

  the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,

  apart, at the snowplace.

  Whirling

  under comet-

  brows

  the gaze’s bulk, toward

  which the eclipsed, tiny

  heart-satellite drifts

  with the

  spark caught outside.

  —Disenfranchised lip, announce,

  that something happens, still,

  not far from you.

  * * *

  FLOWING, big-

  celled sleepingden.

  Each

  partition traveled

  by graysquadrons.

  The letters are breaking formation,

  the last

  dreamproof skiffs—

  each with

  part of the still

  to be sunken sign

  in

  the towrope’s vulturegrip.

  * * *

  TWENTY FOREVER

  evaporated Schlüsselburg-primroses

  in your swimming left

  fist.

  Into the fish-

  scale etched:

  the lines of the hand

  from which they grew.

  Heaven- and earth-

  acid flowed together.

  The time-

  reckoning worked out, without remainder. Cruising

  —for your, quick melancholy, sake—

  scale and fist.

  * * *

  NO SANDART ANYMORE, no sandbook, no masters.

  Nothing in the dice. How

  many mutes?

  Seventen.

  Your question—your answer.

  Your chant, what does it know?

  Deepinsnow,

  Eepinno,

  I—i—o.

  * * *

  BRIGHTNESSHUNGER—with it

  I walked up the bread-

  step, under

  the blindness-

  bell:

  it, water-

  clear,

  claps itself over

  the freedom that climbed with

  me, that misclimbed

  too high, on which

  one of the heavens gorged itself,

  that I let vault above

  the worddrenched

  image orbit, blood orbit.

  * * *

  WHEN WHITENESS ASSAILED US, at night;

  when from the libation-ewer more

  than water came;

  when the skinned knee

  gave the sacrificebell the nod:

  Fly!—

  Then

  I still

  was whole.

  * * *

  HOLLOW LIFEHOMESTEAD. In the windtrap

  the lung

  blown empty

  flowers. A handful

  sleepcorn

  drifts from the mouth

  stammered true

  out toward the snow-

  conversations.

  * * *

  OVER THREE in sea-

  drunken sleep

  with brownalgae-blood

  ciphered breast-

  nipplestones

  clap your

  from the last

  raincord breaking

  loose sky.

  And let

  your freshwatermussel that rode

  with you to this place

  lap all that

  up, before

  you hold her to the ear

  of a clock’s shadow,

  evenings.

  * * *

  ON THE WHITE PHILACTERY—the

  Lord of this hour

  was

  a wintercreature, for his

  sake

  happened what happened—

  my climbing mouth bit in, once more,

  when it looked for you, smoketrace

  you, up there,

  in woman’s shape,

  you on the journey to my

  firethoughts in the blackgravel

  beyond the cleftwords, through

  which I saw you walk, high-

  legged and

  the heavylipped own

  head

  on the by my

  deadly accurate

  hands

  living body.

  Tell your fingers

  accompanying you far in-

  side the crevasses, how

  I knew you, how far

  I pushed you into the deep,

  where my most bitter dream

  slept with you heart-fro, in the bed

  of my inextinguishable name.

  * * *

  GO BLIND today already:

  eternity too is full of eyes—

  wherein

  drowns, what helped the images

  over the path they came,

  wherein

  expires, what took you too out of

  language with a gesture

  that you let happen like

  the dance of two words of just

  autumn and silk and nothingness.

  * * *

  LATEWOODDAY under

  netnerved skyleaf. Through

  bigcelled idlehours clambers, in rain,

  the blackblue, the

  thoughtbeetle.

  Animal-bloodsoming words

  crowd before its feelers.

  * * *

  TODAY:

  nightthings, again, fire whipped.

  Glowing

  naked-plants-dance.

  (Yesterday:

  above the rowing names

  floated faithfulness;

  chalk went around writing;

  open it laid and greeted:

  the turned-to-water book.)

  The owl-pebble raffled—

  from the sleep-cornice

  he looks down

  upon the five-eye, to whom you devolved.

  Otherwise?

  Half- and quarter-

  allies on

  the side of the beaten. Riches of

  lost-soured

  language.

  When they impale

  the last shadow,

  you burn the vowing hand free.

  * * *

  MIDDAY, with

  seconds’ flurry,

  in the roundgraveshadow, into my

  chambe
red pain

  —with you, hither-

  silenced, I lived

  two days in Rome

  on ocher and red—

  you come, I already lie there,

  gliding light through the doors, horizontal—:

  the arms holding you become visible, only they. That much

  secrecy

  I still summoned, in spite of all.

  * * *

  SOWN UNDER the skin of my hands:

  your name comforted

  by hands.

  When I knead the lump

  of air, our nourishment,

  it is leavened by the

  letters’ shimmer from

  the lunatic-open

  pore.

  * * *

  THE HOURGLASS, deep

  in paeony shadow, buried:

  When Thinking comes down

  the Pentecost-lane, finally,

  it inherits that empire,

 

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