by Paul Celan
threadsuns
Above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
As I wrote of this poem in the introduction to that volume, "These 'Fadensonnen,' these threadsuns fold into the word that gives their elongation — the 'Faden,' the thread — something more, something which in English is still there in the word 'fathom,' which comes to us via the Indo-European root pet and Germanic fathmaz: 'the length of two arms stretched out.'" The thread is thus a way of measuring space, or of "sounding" depth (the poem also speaks of a "Lichtton," a "light-tone" or sound) and, maybe, of a measure, or a new measure for the world and for poetry. If the first volume that announced the late work and its radically innovative poetics had been called Breathturn, to indicate that a turn, a change, was needed — had in fact taken place — then the title of this, the next volume, spoke of a new measure, of new measures, to be accurate. Of those new measures needed in a world seen as "grayblack wastes" to link the above and the below, the inside and the outside, the tree-high thought and the wastes, because, Celan goes on, "there still are/songs to be sung," poems to be written even under the duress — Lightduress will be the title of the next collection— of the present condition. Even if these poems are "beyond mankind" — beyond any older humanistic category of aesthetics. (As he told Esther Cameron at this time: "But I don't give a damn for aesthetic construction.") His writing had moved toward such a postaesthetic, posthumanist condition nearly from the start, even if early work, say, the "Todesfuge," achieves this only through an acidly sarcastic use of a traditional aesthetic form. It was the late work that would realize this condition, exactly. Or, as Hugo Huppert remembers Celan's words:
26. Jacques Derrida, "A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text': Poetics and Politics of Witnessing," in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 186, 198.
I don't musicalize anymore, as at the time of the much-touted "Todesfuge," which by now has been threshed over in many a textbook.... As for my alleged encodings, I'd rather say: Polysemy without mask, thus corresponding exactly to my sense of the intersection of ideas (Begriffsuberschneidung), the overlapping of relations. You are aware of the phenomenon of interference, the effect of waves of the same frequency coming together. ... I try to reproduce cuttings from the spectral analysis of things, to show them in several aspects and permeations at once.... I see my alleged abstractness and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.27
On April 6, 1970, Paul Celan wrote in a letter to his friend liana Shmueli: "When I read my poems, they grant me, momentarily, the possibility to exist, to stand."28 Two weeks later Celan gave himself over to the drift of the Seine, exhausted after having stood tirelessly, selflessly for the possibility of a new life. His is the life of the survivor,
yes, but not only: it is essential today, I believe, to give Paul Celan back the spread of humanitas he wanted and stood for with his life and work, with the Dichtung and the Wahrheit of the life and work. We are only beginning to learn how to read Paul Celan's work, and maybe the best way to approach this task is to take to heart what he said in an unsent letter to Rene Char (p. 184): "To that in your work which did not — or not yet — open up to my comprehension, I responded with respect and by waiting: one can never pretend to comprehend completely —: that would be disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits — or comes to inhabit — the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something one breathes; that poetry breathes you in."
27. Werner Hamacher and Winfried Menninghaus, eds., Paul Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), 320-21.
28. liana Schmueli, Sag, doss Jerusalem ist. Uber Paul Celan: October 7969-April 7970 (Eggingen: Edition Isele, 2000), 75.
Previous page:
Gisele Celan-Lestrange,
etching, no. 4 in the series
Atemkrutall.
from ROMANIAN PROSE POEMS
AS Partisan OF Erotic Absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among divers, and simultaneous messenger of Paul Celan's halo, I evoke the petrified apparitions of the sunk airship only every ten (or more) years, and I go skating only at the latest hour on a lake guarded by the giant forest of brainless members of the world-poets-conspiracy. It's easy to understand that here you cannot get through with the arrows of visible fire. At the border of the world an infinitely large amethyst-curtain hides the existence of that human-shaped vegetation beyond which I, selenic, attempt a dance supposed to make me ecstatic. But so far I have not succeeded, and with my eyes, which have migrated to my temples, I contemplate my profile, waiting for spring.
from MOHN UND GEDACHTNIS/ POPPY AND MEMORY
THE SAND FROM THE URNS
Moldgreen is the house of forgetting.
Before each of the blowing gates your decapitated bandsman blues.
For you he beats the drum of moss and bitter pubic hair;
with festering toe he draws your brow in the sand.
He draws it longer than it was, and the red of your lip.
You fill the urns here and feed your heart.
IN PRAISE OF REMOTENESS
In the wellspring of your eyes
live the fish-nets of the labyrinth-sea.
In the wellspring of your eyes
the ocean keeps its promise.
Here I, a
heart that lingered among men,
cast off my clothes and the luster of a vow:
Blacker in black, I am nuder.
Only when faithless am I true.
I am you when I am I.
In the wellspring of your eyes
I drift and dream about prey.
A net snared a net:
we separate entwined.
In the wellspring of your eyes
a hanged man strangles the rope.
CORONA
Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends.
We are picking time out of a nut, we teach it to run:
and time rushes back to its shell.
In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dreams people sleep,
the mouth tells the truth.
My eye descends to the sex of my loved one,
we gaze at each other,
we whisper out darkness,
we love one another like poppies and memory,
we sleep like wine in a seashell,
like the sea in the moon's bloody rays.
Embracing we stand by the window, and people look up from
the street:
it is time that they knew!
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
that unrest formed a heart.
It is time it was time.
It is time.
DEATH FUGUE
Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair
Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing
he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us play up for the dance
Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair
Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's
roomy to
lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you men you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men play up again for
the dance
Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there's a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes
He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss
aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in
the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it's roomy to lie
Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he hits you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there's a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus
Deutschland
your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite
THE JARS
for Klaus Demus
At the long tables of time
God's jars are boozing.
They guzzle the eyes of the seeing and the eyes of the blind,
the hearts of the ruling shadows,
the hollow cheek of evening.
They are the mightiest boozers:
they raise to their lips the empty as well as the full
and don't spill over like you or I.
Count the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you awake,
count me in with them:
I searched for your eye which you opened when nobody saw you,
I spun that mysterious thread
down which the dew that you dreamed
slithered into a pitcher
kept from harm by a word found in nobody's heart.
There you first came into a name that was yours,
sure of foot you advanced on yourself,
the clappers swung free in your silence's belltower,
whatever you heard took a hold of you,
whatever was dead laid its hand on you too,
and threefold you moved through the evening.
Make me bitter.
Count me in with the almonds.
from VON SCHWELLE ZU SCHWELLE/ FROM THRESHOLD TO THRESHOLD
I HEARD IT SAID
I heard it said there was
a stone in the water and a circle,
and above the water a word
that lays the circle around the stone.
I saw my poplar go down to the water,
I saw her arm reach down into the depth,
I saw her roots beg skyward for night.
I did not run after her,
I only picked up from the ground the crumb
that has your eye's shape and nobility,
I took the chain of proverbs off your neck
and with it hemmed the table where the crumb now lay.
And no longer saw my poplar.
WITH A VARIABLE KEY
With a variable key
you unlock the house, in it
drifts the snow of the unsaid.
Depending on the blood that gushes
from your eye or mouth or ear,
your key varies.
Varies your key so varies your word
that's allowed to drift with the flakes.
Depending on the wind that pushes you away,
the snow cakes around the word.
SHIBBOLETH
Along with my stone
like a great tear that fell
in back of the shutters,
they hauled me
into the dust of a market,
that place
where a flag was unrolled
to which I never had sworn.
Flutes,
double-flutes of the night:
remember the dark
and twin redness,
Madrid and Vienna.
Memory,
set up your flag at half-mast.
At half-mast
today and forever.
Heart:
let us see you here too,
here in the dust of this market.
Thunder your shibboleth here
into your alien homeland:
February. No pasardn.
Unicorn:
you know of the stones
you know of the water,
come,
let me lead you away
toward the voices
of Estremadura.
SPEAK. YOU TOO
Speak, you too,
speak as the last one,
have your say.
Speak —
But do not separate the no from the yes.
Give your saying also meaning:
give it its shadow.
Give it enough shadow,
give it as much
as you know to be parceled out between
midnight and midday and midnight.
Look around:
see how alive it gets all around —
At death! Alive!
Speaks true, who speaks shadows.
But now the place shrinks, on which you stand:
Whereto now, shadow-stripped one, whereto?
Climb. Feel yourself upwards.
Thinner you become, unrecognizable, finer!
Finer: a fathom
along which it wants to descend, the star:
to swim down below, below
where he sees himself swimming: in the swell
of wandering words.
THE VINTAGERS
For Nani and Klaus Demus
They gather the grapes of their eyes,
they tread all weeping, even this:
the night wills it,
the night on which they are leaning, the wall,
the stone demands it,
the stone over which their cane speaks away
into the hush of the answer —
their cane that once,
once in autumn,
when the year swells towards death, as a cluster of grapes,
the cane that speaks once through the muteness, down
into the shaft of the imagined.
They gather, they tread the grapes,
they press time like their eye,
they cellar the seeping, the weeping,
in the sun's grave that they prepare
with a night-strong hand:
so that a mouth may thirst for it, later —
a late-mouth, akin to theirs:
bent towards blindness and paralyzed,
a mouth to which the draught foams up from the depth, while
the sky descends into the waxen sea
to glow from afar as a candle-stub
when the lip moistens at last.
from SPRACHGITTER/SPEECH-GRILLE
Voices, in green of watersurface
sketched. When the kingfisher dives,
the second whizzes:
What stood by you
on either shore
it steps
mown into another scene.
Voices from the nettlepath:
Come on your hands to us. Who is alone with
the lamp has only his hand to read from.
Voices, nightpervaded, ropes on which
you hang the bell.
Arch over, world:
When the shell of death comes floating in, it will toll here.
Voices, at which your heart
bac
k into your mother's heart shrinks.
Voices from the gallowstree,
where slowwood and quickwood exchange
and exchange rings.
Voices, fullthroated, in slag, where even the
Infinite shovels, (hearr-) slimy runnel.
Set the boats out here, child, which I
manned:
When midships the squall takes command, the bolts
strain together.
Jacobsvoice:
The tears.
The tears in brothereye.
One left hanging, grew.
We dwell there.
Breathe, that
it let go.
Voices from within the ark:
It is
only the mouths are saved. You
who go down, hear us too.
No
voice — a
slowsound, timestrange, to your
thoughts bestowed, here, at last
hereawakens: a
fruitleaf, eyesized, deep
scratched; it
oozes, will not
scab over.
TENEBRAE
Nigh are we, Lord,
near and graspable.
Gripped already, Lord,
in each other clutched, as though
the body of each of us were