Paul Celan_Selections

by Paul Celan

  the missing target

  radiates, bow.

  THE INDUSTRIOUS

  mineral resources, homey,

  the heated syncope,

  the not-to-be-deciphered

  jubilee,

  the completely glassed in

  spider-altars in the all-

  overtowering low building,

  the intermediate sounds

  (even yet?)

  the shadowpalavers,

  the anxieties, icetrue,

  flightclear,

  the baroquely cloaked,

  language-swallowing showerroom,

  semantically floodlit,

  the uninscribed wall

  of a standing-cell:

  here

  live yourself

  straightthrough, without clock.

  WHEN I DON'T KNOW, DON'T KNOW,

  without you, without you, without a You,

  they all come,

  the

  freebeheaded, who

  lifelong brainlessly sang

  of the tribe

  of the You-less:

  Aschrej,

  a word without meaning,

  transtibetan,

  injected into the

  Jewess

  Pallas

  Athena's

  helmeted ovaries,

  and when he,

  he,

  fetally,

  harps Carpathian notnot,

  then the Allemande

  bobbins her lace for

  the vomiting im-

  mortal

  song.

  YOU Were my death:

  you I could hold,

  when all fell from me.

  LINE THE WORDCAVES

  with panther skins,

  widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,

  sense-hither and sense-thither,

  give them courtyards, chambers, trapdoors

  and wildnesses, parietal,

  and listen for their second

  and each time second and second

  tone.

  NEAR. IN THE AORTIC ARCH.

  in the light-blood:

  the light-word.

  Mother Rachel

  weeps no more.

  Carried over:

  all the weepings.

  Quiet, in the coronary arteries,

  unconstricted:

  Ziv, that light.

  IMAGINE

  Imagine:

  the moorsoldier from Masada

  teaches himself homeland, in

  the most inextinguishable way,

  against

  all barbs in the wire.

  Imagine:

  the eyeless without shape

  lead you free through the throng, you

  grow stronger and

  stronger.

  Imagine: your

  own hand

  has held once

  more this

  into life re-

  suffered

  piece of

  inhabitable earth.

  Imagine:

  that came towards me,

  awake to the name, awake to the hand,

  forever,

  from what cannot be buried.

  ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

  from LICHTZWANG/ LIGHTDURESS

  SOUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS, On

  ward onethousandandone,

  daynightly

  the Bear-Polka:

  they retrain you,

  you again become

  he.

  WE ALREADY LAY

  deep in the underbrush, when you

  finally crept along.

  But we could not

  darken over towards you:

  there reigned

  lightduress.

  Contact Mines on your left

  moons, Saturn.

  Shardsealed

  the orbits out there.

  Now must be the moment

  for a just

  birth.

  Cleared, this start

  also.

  Bow-wheelchant with

  Corona.

  The duskrudder responds,

  your torn-

  awake vein

  unknots itself,

  what's left of you, slants,

  you gain

  altitude.

  Once, death was much in demand,

  you hid in me.

  TWO AT BRANCUSI'S

  If one among these stones

  were to tell

  what conceals it:

  here, nearby,

  on the old man's crutch-stick,

  it would open, as a wound,

  into which you'd have to dive,

  lonely,

  far from my scream, the already also

  hewn, white one.

  TODTNAUBERG

  Arnica, eyebright, the

  draft from the well with the

  star-die on top,

  in the

  Hiitte,

  written in the book

  — whose name did it record

  before mine—?

  in this book

  the line about

  a hope, today,

  for a thinker's

  word

  to come,

  in the heart,

  forest turf, unleveled,

  orchis and orchis, singly,

  crudeness, later, while driving,

  clearly,

  he who drives us, the man,

  he who also hears it,

  the half-

  trod log-

  trails on the highmoor,

  humidity,

  much.

  TO A BROTHER IN ASIA

  The auto-transfigured

  cannons

  drive toward heaven,

  ten

  bombers yawn,

  a running fire blooms,

  as surely as peace,

  a handful of rice

  expires as your friend.

  ORANIENSTRASSE 1

  Tin grew in my hand

  I didn't know how

  to help myself.

  I didn't want to mould,

  it didn't want to read me —

  If now

  Ossietzky's last

  drinking bowl

  could be found,

  I'd let the tin

  learn from it,

  and the host of pilgrims'

  staffs

  would ensilence, endure the hours.

  Strew Ocher into my eyes:

  you no longer

  live there,

  save

  on the tomb-

  furnishings, save,

  pace off the stonerows,

  on your hands,

  with their dream

  paint over the

  stamped out

  temporal bone's squama,

  at the

  great

  bifurcation re-

  count yourself to the ocher,

  three times, nine times.

  LEAP CENTURIES, leap

  seconds, leap-

  births, novembering, leap-

  deaths,

  stocked in honeycomb-troughs,

  bits

  on chips,

  the menorah-poem from Berlin,

  (Unasylumed, un-

  archived, un-

  cared for, a

  -live?),

  reading station in the late-word,

  economical ignition points

  in the sky,

  crests under fire,

  feelings, frost-

  spindled,

  cold start —

  with hemoglobin.

  TREK-SCOW-TIME.

  the half-transformed drag

  at one of the worlds,

  the dis-elevated one, intimated,

  speaks under the foreheads on the bank:

  Quits with death, quits with

  God.

  You Be Like You. always.

  Stant up Jh
erosalem inde

  erheyff dich

  Even he who cut the bond with you,

  inde wirt

  erluchtet

  knots it anew, in the Gehugnis,

  mudclots I swallowed, in the tower,

  language, dark pilaster strip,

  kumi

  ori.

  ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

  from SCHNEEPART/ SNOWPART

  UNWASHED, UNPAINTED,

  in Hereafter's

  pithead:

  there

  where we find ourselves,

  Earthy, always,

  a

  belated

  bucket conveyor pierces

  us cloudtorn,

  upwards, downwards,

  seditious

  piping inside, on Fool's

  legs,

  the flightshadow in

  the iridescing round

  heals us in, into the seven-

  height,

  ice-age-close

  the felt swan pair steers

  through the hovering

  stone-icon

  You Lie in the great listening

  ambushed, snowed in.

  Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,

  go to the butcher hooks,

  to the red apple stakes

  from Sweden —

  Here comes the table with the presents,

  he turns around an Eden —

  The man became a sieve, the woman

  had to swim, the saw,

  for herself, for none, for everyone —

  The Landwehrkanal will not roar

  Nothing

  stops.

  Lilac Air with yellow windowstains,

  Orion's belt above the

  Anhalter ruin,

  Flamehour, nothing

  intercurrent yet,

  from

  standing bar to

  snow bar.

  Well-graves in the wind:

  someone will play the viola, day downward, in the ale house,

  someone will stand on his head in the word Enough,

  someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch.

  This year

  does not roar across,

  it throws back December, November,

  it turns up its wounds,

  it opens up to you, young

  grave-

  well,

  twelvemouth.

  THE BREACHED YEAR

  with the moldering edges

  of delusion bread.

  Drink

  from my mouth.

  UNREADABILITY of this

  world. All doubles.

  The strong clocks

  back the fissure-hour,

  hoarsely.

  You, wedged into your deepest,

  climb out of yourself

  for ever.

  Whorish Else. And eternity

  blood-black circumbabeled.

  Moored

  by your loamy locks

  my faith.

  Two fingers, far from the hand,

  a-row the swampy

  oath.

  WHAT NEWS

  at this voice? What

  does this

  voice

  sew

  hither, beyond?

  The chasms are

  sworn in on White, from them

  arose

  the snowneedle,

  swallow it,

  you order the world,

  that counts

  as much as nine names,

  named on knees,

  tumuli, tumuli,

  you hill away, alive,

  come

  into the kiss,

  a flip of the fin,

  steady,

  lights up the bays,

  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,r />
  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