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.
* * *
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,