Selections Read online

  But beyond the witnessing to the past, Celan also witnesses for the possibility of a vita nuova, a new life — maybe only or mainly in an indirect way, that is, by bearing witness (as Derrida points out) to the possibility of the poem and by having the poem itself say that witnessing. A poem from Breathturn, a poem whose importance is signaled by the fact that one of its composita will become the title of the next volume, Threadsuns, reads

  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 o
f 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 ano
ther 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

  back into your mother's heart shrinks.