by Paul Celan
So, all alone, I saw Petersburg, the workers, the sailors of the Aurora. It was very moving, at times reminding one of the “Potemkin,” bringing to mind the thoughts and dreams of my childhood, my thoughts of today and of always, poetry-always-true-always-faithful, I saw my placards, many of them, those that, not very long ago, I evoked in the poem I sent you—Vaporband-, banderole-uprising,” I saw the October Revolution, its men, its flags, I saw hope always en route, the brother of poetry, I saw …
Then, at a certain moment, at the moment when the insurgents occupy the Winter Palace, it began to desert poetry and to become Cinema, motion-picture shots, tendentious and overdone, the intertexts became propaganda—all that was History and its Personages had anyway been, from the very beginning, what was the least convincing, the role of the Left Social-Revolutionaries was completely expunged—, so then the heart loosened, searched for its silences (won, lost, won again), wrapped them around itself and led me outside, alone, as I had come in, running the gauntlet between young cinephile gents and young girls “mit tupierter Frisur,” with too much makeup, in pants, sort of leftist sixteenth arrondissement, erratic and flabby.—But there were some, no doubt, who knew, taking, here too, responsibility for the terrible eclipses.
Long live the sailors of Kronstadt!
Long live the Revolution! Long live Love!
Long live Petersburg! Long live Paris!
Long live Poetry!”
“All deine Siegel erbrochen? Nie.” | “All your seals broken open? Never.”
Composed on the train from Montpellier to Avignon on October 26 and completed on November 23, 1965 (his forty-fifth birthday) in Switzerland.
verzedere | cedarize: A Celanian neologism, of which Ulrich Konietzny says: “The verb ‘verzedern’ can only be deduced connotatively maybe with the meaning that something like cedar wood should be worked through. One can also read it as an allusion to the habitual burning of strongly aromatic cedar wood in Israel” (Konietzny, 1988, p. 108). I do, however, always hear the particle ver- in Celan as indicating a deviation from a direction or aim into something that is wrong, or into the opposite of what was intended, and as the destructive motion in words like verreißen, “to pull to pieces,” etc. There are of course some positive meanings to this particle, as in verknüpfen, “to tie together,” verdichten, “to tighten,” etc. There are close to three hundred occurrences of the particle ver- in Celan’s work, many of them in neologic constructions, such as verzedere, and many of these with somewhat negative connotations.
honig- / ferne, die milch- / nahe | honey- / distant, milk- / close: Compare Exod. 3:8: “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”
Elektronen-Idioten | electron- / idiot … Datteln | dates: The double meaning of the English word “dates,” as Datteln, the fruit, and as Daten, dates and even data, the latter suggested by the “Elektronen-Idioten” of the previous line, according to at least one commentator, was an intended pun by Celan (Oelmann, Deutsche poetologische Lyrik nach 1945, p. 394f; quoted by Konietzny).
menetekelnde / Affen | portentous / apes: Compare Dan. 5:24–27: “Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. / And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. / This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. / TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” Rembrandt’s painting Belshazzar’s Feast shows the moment when the divine hand writes on the wall the Hebrew phrase that only Daniel can decipher. Celan had seen this painting in the National Gallery in London.
II
“Schlafbrocken” | “Sleepmorsels”
June 13, 1966, Paris. The first poem Celan wrote after his release from Sainte-Anne, the psychiatric clinic in Paris where he concluded a six-month internment after his attempt to kill Gisèle on November 24, 1965, an internment that took him first to the Garches, then Suresnes, and finally the Paris psychiatric clinics (see Introduction, p. xxxviii). The first draft has the dedication “for Gisèle.” A first printing by Brunidor, Vaduz (Liechtenstein), included an etching by Gisèle.
“Die Wahrheit” | “Truth”
July 29, 1966, Paris.
“Aus den nahen” | “Out of the near”
August 1–4, 1966, Moisville.
“Ausgeschlüpfte” | “Hatched”
August 8, 1966, Paris.
Gebetmäntel | prayercoats: The German word connotes the tallith, or prayer shawl, which is, however, traditionally white. Compare the poem “Schaufäden, Sinnfäden” | “Sight threads, sense threads” (p. 86).
Brandkraut | lampwick: Plant of the Phlomis family, possibly here Phlomis lychnitis, which has astringent qualities; its leaves have been used to make wicks for oil lamps.
“Ewigkeiten” | “Eternities”
August 9, 1966. Celan has at least six poems with the word “eternity” or its plural in the title or opening line: “Ewigkeiten” | “Eternities” (p. 140), “Die Ewigkeiten tingeln” | “The eternities honkytonk” (p. 162), “Die Ewigkeit” | “Eternity” (p. 176), “Die Ewigkeiten” | “The eternities” (p. 272), “Huriges Sonst” | “Whorish else” (p. 326), and “Die Ewigkeit” | “Eternity” (p. 398).
“Der puppige Steinbrech” | “The perty saxifrage”
August 20, 1966, Moisville. The next poem was also written on that day, and the following one begun.
Steinbrech | saxifrage: The German name Steinbrech literally means “stone breaker,” as does its Late Latin root, saxifrage; from Latin, feminine of saxifragus, “breaking rocks,” from saxum, “rock,” and frangere, “to break” (Merriam-Webster). Traditionally thought to indicate its ancient medicinal use for treatment of urinary calculi, i.e., kidney stones.
“Die zwischenein-” | “The between-whiles”
August 20, 1966, Moisville.
Gletschermilch | glacier milk: Waters of a glacial stream in which particles of light-colored silt are suspended.
“Der geglückte” | “The successful”
Begun August 16, 1966, in London; finished August 20, 1966, in Moisville.
Paulownia: A tree Celan liked and links both to his homeland, the Bukovina, and to his name, Paul, though it also appears in darker circumstances in the poem “La Contrescarpe” (in Die Niemandsrose). As this poem will be referred to several times in the commentaries but is not included in this volume, I will insert it here in its entirety:
LA CONTRESCARPE
Break out the breathcoin
from the air around you and the tree:
so
much
is required from him
whom hope carts up and down
the hearthumpway—so
much
at the turning,
where he meets the breadarrow
that drunk the wine of his night, the wine
of the misery-, the kings-
vigil.
Didn’t the hands come along, the awake
ones, didn’t happiness, deeply
embedded in her chalice-eye, come?
Didn’t the human-toned, lidded
Marchpipe come along, that gave light,
back then, widely?
Did the carrier pigeon sheer off, was its ring
to be deciphered? (All those
clouds around it—they were readable.) Did the
flock suffer it? And understand
and take off while it stayed away?
Roof shingle slipway,—on pigeon-
keel what swims is laid. Through the bulkheads
the message bleeds, time-barred things
go overboard:
Via Kraków
you came, at the Anhalter
railway station
a smoke flowed toward your
glance,
it already belonged to tomorrow. Under
paulownias
you saw the knives stand, again,
made sharp by distance. There was
dancing. (Quatorze
juillets. Et plus de neufs autres.)
Overdwarf, monkeyverse, slantmouth
mimed lived experience. The lord,
wrapped in a banner, joined
the swarm. He snapped
himself
a little souvenir. The self-
timer, that was
you.
O this dis-
friending. Yet again,
there, where you have to go, the one
exact
crystal.
“Auf überregneter Fährte” | “On the rained-over spoor”
August 23, 1966, Moisville.
“Weißgeräusche” | “Whitesounds”
September 5–October 10, 1966. A poem commissioned for a Festschrift for Hans Mayer; the first draft has the initials H.M. as title.
Flaschenpost | bottle post: Wiedemann (BW, p. 762) locates the idea of the poem as a letter in a bottle or a bottle post in an improvised contribution by Hans Mayer on a poem by Goethe at an October 1957 meeting, where Celan and Mayer first met. Mayer couldn’t locate the source of his quote after Celan asked for it on several occasions, but in a letter to the literary scholar Joachim Seng, he says: “In remembrance of conversations with Adorno on his favorite theme of ‘literature as an esoteric bottle post.’” Wiedemann further suggests that with this poem Celan is thanking Mayer for having sparked the idea formulated in 1958 in his Bremen Prize speech: “A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In that way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward” (PCCP, p. 35).
“Die teuflischen” | “The devilish”
September 1, 1966, Moisville.
“Die Dunkel-Impflinge” | “The dark vaccination candidates”
September 6, 1966, Paris.
“Die zweite” | “The second”
September 27–October 5, 1966, Paris.
“Das ausgeschachtete Herz” | “The excavated heart”
October 7, 1966. The following poems also started on this day.
“Die fleißigen” | “The industrious”
October 7–9, 1966.
Synkope | syncope: A rich word in both languages that can refer to (1) in medicine, loss of consciousness, or (2) in linguistics, the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel, or (3) in music, a musical effect caused by a syncope, missed beat, or off-the-beat stress.
Halljahr | jubilee: Compare Lev. 25:10–13: “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. / A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you; ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of the undressed vines. / For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy unto you; ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. / In this year of jubilee ye shall return every man unto his possession.” Compare also the poem “Und Kraft und Schmerz” | “And strength and pain” (p. 380).
der barock ummantelte, / spracheschluckende Duschraum | the baroquely cloaked, / language-swallowing showerroom: In the extermination camps, the gas chambers were camouflaged as shower rooms.
Stehzelle | standing-cell: Wiedemann points to two occurrences of this word in newspaper articles in Celan’s possession, the first describing a visit by legal experts to such a cell in Auschwitz in December 1964, recorded in Die Welt of January 13, 1965, as is the following quote from the same article: “Under no circumstances could one speak here of a disparagement of the victims. In the standing cells of Bloc 11 in Auschwitz many detainees starved to death” (BW, p. 763).
“Die kollidierenden” | “The colliding”
October 11, 1966, Paris–October 14, 1966, Cologne. From October 11 to October 18, 1966, Celan was in Germany for poetry readings. A draft of the poem was found on an October 12 concert program from Cologne, which Celan sent to his friend Ruth Kraft.
“Eingehimmelt” | “In-heavened”
October 24, 1966, Paris. Celan dated the poem with his full address, “78 rue de Longchamp, XIVth,” a rare event.
Lidschlagreflexe | eyeblinkreflexes: An involuntary reaction, the corneal reflex is the blink that occurs upon irritation of the eye. It is mediated through the trigeminal nerve (cranial nerve); its aim is to protect the eyes from foreign bodies. The absence of corneal reflex may indicate damage to the brain stem (adapted from MedicineNet.com and other sources). The corneal reflex is also very noticeable during the dream-heavy period of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Celan had encountered the term in his reading of Reichel/Bleichert, Leitfaden der Physiologie des Menschen.
“Wenn ich nicht weiß, nicht weiß” | “When I don’t know, don’t know”
December 23, 1966, Paris. Celan’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. On December 27, 1966, he wrote to Gisèle: “I wrote a hard, difficult to translate poem, with among other lines, this one: ‘The Jewess Pallas Athena’—” (PC/GCL, #469).
Wenn ich nicht weiß, nicht weiß | When I don’t know, don’t know: Compare the opening line/stanza of Hölderlin’s hymn fragment “Heimath” (Home): “Und niemand weiß” (and no one knows). Otto Pöggeler also points out that “in the ode ‘Rousseau’ one finds the line ‘and no one / knows how to show the modest way’ [‘und niemand / weiß den bescheidenen Weg zu weisen’]. The second stanza of the elegy ‘Brot und Wein’ says concerning the ‘wonderful’ goodwill of the heavenly ones: ‘and no one / knows from whence and what befalls one from it’ [‘und niemand / Weiß von wannen und was einem geschiehet von ihr’]” (SPUR, p. 270).
Aschrej | Ashrei: Ashrei (Hebrew ) is a word meaning “happy,” “praiseworthy,” or “fortunate” as in Deut. 33:29: “Happy art thou, O Israel.” The Ashrei is a prayer that is recited at least three times daily in Jewish prayers, twice during Shacharit and once during Mincha. It is composed primarily of Psalm 145 in its entirety, with a verse each from Psalms 84 and 144 added to the beginning and a verse from Psalm 115 added to the end. The first two verses that are added both start with the Hebrew word ashrei, hence the prayer’s name. In Luther’s translation, the verse from Deuteronomy reads: “Wohl dir, Israel!” The other German word that most closely translates this word is Heil.
der Jüdin / Pallas / Athene | the / Jewess / Pallas / Athena’s: Writes Barbara Hahn in her book of the same title:
In Greek mythology, Pallas Athena with her double name wears a helmet upon her head and a shield across her breast. Ovaries, however, she does not have. She was neither born of a mother nor can become one. She is the daughter of her father, Zeus, from whose head she sprang, and which, in some traditions, split asunder, so that in thunder and lightning she could come into the world … Athena, this daughter without a mother, interrupts all female genealogies and founds no traditions. Pallas Athena, the warrior, the thinking woman, whose symbol is the owl, is a unique occurrence. A point without history, with no before and no after.
The “Jewess” is something quite different. Since the end of the eighteenth century, an erotically charged word with a meaning that depends on exclusion. It signaled a danger for the German man and threatened a “corruption of German culture”; it stood for the foreign, the ominous, the other. Celan’s poem shatters this context. Ovaries have no erotic connotation. Ovaries designate the fecundity of women, and women were targeted by the National Socialist genocide because they could be mothers. They were sterilized—squirted in the ovaries—so that they could no longer hand on life. And they were murdered, so that never again would a Mother Rahel weep for her children.
The “Jewess Pallas Athena.” This shocking phrase demolishes an anchor of National Socialist ideology: the supposed contradiction between “Semitic” and “Indo-European”—what German philology calls “Indo-Germanic.” Beyond this opposition, something in common is asserted that encompasses both the culture of ancient Greece and the Jewish tradition. What appear to be entirely contrary meanings can suddenly be thought together, meanings that had been lost in the clichéd images of the “Jewess.” Two traditions interweave, and to monotheistic Judaism is joined a culture that understood Wisdom, Knowledge, Art, and Memory as feminine nouns. Sophia and Mnemosyne, the Muses and Theoria. A culture in which feminine words and female figures bear memories just as Rahel, Esther, and Sulamith recall the Jewish people for Celan. (pp. 5–6)
karpatisches | Carpathian: The Carpathian Mountains are a range of mountains forming an arc roughly 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) long across central and eastern Europe, making them the second-longest mountain range in Europe, stretching in an arc from the Czech Republic in the northwest to Serbia in the south. Celan’s homeland, the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine, was part of the Carpathian stretch. Wiedemann adds that the Bukovina “ceased to exist after the resettlement of its German and the extermination of its Jewish inhabitants” (BW, p. 765).
Allemande: A popular instrumental dance form of baroque music and an element of a suite. The French word means literally “German,” interesting here for its linguistic triangulation between the German of the poem, the Hebrew word ashrei, and the French word for “German.” Hahn (pp. 4–5) notes an interesting coincidence with that linguistic triangle and the triangle formed by the “I, You, and He” of the poem.