Celan, Paul - Glottal Stop (Wesleyan, 2004) PDF

Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page i
glottal stop
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page ii
wesleyan poetry
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page iii
glottal stop
101 poems by
paul celan
translated by
Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh
wesleyan university press
Middletown, Connecticut
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page iv
Published by Wesleyan University Press,

Published byCT 06459
Middletown,
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
w esleyan university press
Front matter,CT
Middletown, notes, and English translations
06459
© 2000
Front by Nikolai
matter, notes,Popov and Heather
and English McHugh
translations
All rightsbyreserved
© 2000 Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh
First Wesleyan
All rights paperback 2004
reserved
isbn for in
Printed theUnited
paperback
Statesedition: 978-0-8195-6720-8
of America
5 4 3 2in the United States of America 5 4 3
Printed
cip data appear at the end of the bookbook
The poems translated in this book (with the

exception of “Don’t sign your name” / “Schreib dich
nicht”) were collected in Paul Celan, Gesammelte
Werke © Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983 (see Index for
volume and page). They were originally published in
German in the following works and are translated
herein by permission of the publishers:
Works by Paul Celan copyrighted by Suhrkamp

Verlag Frankfurt am Main: Atemwende, © 1967;
Fadensonnen, © 1968; Lichtzwang, © 1970;
Schneepart, © 1971; Zeitgehoft, © 1976;
Eingedunkelt, © 1983.
Paul Celan, “Stimmen,” “Sommerbericht,” taken

from Sprachgitter, © S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 1959. “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit,” “Selbdritt,
Selbviert,” “Erratisch,” “Einiges Handähnliche,”
“Einem, der vor der Tür stand,” “Ein Wurfholz,”
“Wohin mir das Wort” “Die Silbe Schmerz,” and “La
Contrescarpe,” taken from Die Niemandsrose, ©
S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1963.
UK and Commonwealth rights to publish a new

translation of “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit” by Paul
Celan are granted by Anvil Press Poetry Ltd.
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page v
contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Glottal Stop
Voices, scored into 1
summer report 4
With wine and being lost, with 5
threesome, foursome 6
erratic 7
Hand- 8
To one who stood outside the door, one 9
Flung wood 11
How low could it go, my once immortal word 12
pain, the syll able 13
l a contrescarpe 15
Floated down blackwater rapids 17
Gray-white of sheer 18
(I know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low 19
Singable remainder—trace 20
Flooding, big 21
Go blind at once, today 22
Ring-narrowing Day under 23
At high noon, in 25
The hourglass buried 25
Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep 26
Go back and add up 27
Half-mauled, mask- 28
From fists white with the truth 29
Noisemakers shoot into the light: it’s the Truth 30
You forget you forget 31
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page vi
Crackpots, decomposing 32
Lichtenberg’s heir- 33
The sight of the songbirds at dusk 34
Gurgling, then 35
frankfurt, september 36
Coincidence staged, the signs all 38
Who 39
Spasms, I love you, psalms 40
night in pau 41
l ater in pau 42
The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion 43
lyon, les archers 44
Sleep-pieces, wedges 45
Attached to out-cast 46
Graygreens 47
Chitin sunlings 48
Eternities dead 49
Hothouse of an asylum 50
Lucky, the 51
On the rainsoaked rutted road 52
White noises, bundled 53
Your heart manholed 54
Here are the industrious 55
When I don’t know, when I don’t know 56
Gigantic 57
Day freed from demons 58
Husks of the finite, stretchable 59
Wet from the world 60
Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids 61
Eyeshot’s island, broken 62
Eternity gets older: at 63
It’s late. A fat fetish 64
Come, we are cutting out 65
vi
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page vii
Free of dross, free of dross 66

Soul-blind behind the ashes 67
Next-door-neighbor Night 68
The ropes, stiff with salt water 69
Out of angel flesh, on 70
Upholster the word-hollows 71
Walls of speech, space inwards 72
Four ells of earth 73
Naked under death leaves 74
Stone of incest, rolled away 75
As loud colors, heaped up 76
The chimney-swallow, sister 77
White, white, white 78
haut mal 79
The golfball growth 80
Windfield bound for winter: this 81
Who stood that round? 82
Audio-visual vestiges in 83
Knock out 84
Eternities swept 85
She of the freckled farewells 86
Degenerate 87
Assembly- 88
Weather hand 89
Nightsources, distant 90
Unwashed, unpainted 91
Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows 92
You with the dark slingshot 93
I gave a chance 94
proverb on the wall 95
The aural apparatus drives a flower 96
Open glottis, air flow 97
Raised bog, the shape of 98
vii
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page viii
Particles, patriarchs, buried 99

And force and pain 100
A reading branch, just one 101
The cables have already been laid 103
The splintering echo, darkened 104
Nowhere, with its silken veil 104
In the most remote of 105
O little root of a dream 107
Don’t sign your name 108
Notes 109
Index of English Titles/First Lines

and German Titles/Half-Titles 141
viii
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page ix
acknowledgments
Our enterprise benefited from the generosity of many friends and col-
leagues. Jerry Glenn read an early version of the manuscript and
made invaluable comments; over the years we were encouraged and
supported by James Lyon, John Felstiner, Robert Pinsky, John Hol-
lander, Michael Speier, and the late Ernst Behler. Our editors at
Wesleyan University Press—Suzanna Tamminen and Tom Radko—
kept the faith through a protracted copyright negotiation. Sarah
Spence at Literary Imagination, by contacting Petra Hardt at Suhr-
kampVerlag, enabled us to break the copyright ice-jam. Yehuda
Amichai blessed our very first efforts. We thank them all.
The following magazines originally published or reprinted (some-

times under other titles) poems now collected here:
Boston Review
With wine and being lost, with
Threesome, Foursome
Frankfurt, September
Your heart manholed
The Drunken Boat
Who
Lyon, Les Archers
Eternity gets older: at
Harper’s
Come, we are cutting out
Windfield bound for winter: this
Weather hand
Open glottis, air flow
The cables have already been laid
Jubilat
Floated down blackwater rapids
Spasms, I love you, psalms
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page x
Graygreens
Ring-narrowing Day, under
Attached to out-cast
Chitin sunlings
Literary Imagination
The sight of the songbirds
Gigantic
Weather hand
Open glottis, air flow
Marlboro Review
Voices, scored into
Noisemakers shoot into the Light: it’s the Truth
As loud colors, heaped up
White, white, white
Haut Mal
Seneca Review
Coincidence staged, the signs all
Eyeshot’s island, broken
Flung wood
You with the dark slingshot
Out of angel flesh, on
Pain, the syllable
Verse
Erratic
Gray-white of sheer
At high noon, in
Go back and add up
Half-mauled, mask
Wet from the world
Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids
Walls of speech, inwards space
She of the freckled farewells
And force and pain
x
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xi
preface
In 1992 when we began this project, our intention was to supply ver-
sions of Celan poems not yet available in English.1 Such a restriction
focused our attention on Celan’s collections Fadensonnen and Atem-
wende. As our work progressed we added untranslated poems from
Celan’s later books and retranslated a few poems already available in
English, for the sake of contextual coherence (Celan’s later poems
often quote, allude to, or rewrite earlier poems of his). We believe that
only a wide range of translatorial approaches can do justice to a
poetry as complex as Celan’s, and through our selection and method
we have emphasized some of his understudied poetic virtues. Our se-
lection bypasses many major poems of Celan’s middle period (most of
those can be found in Neugroschel and Hamburger); it contains
poems from a later, less known, and more opaque, elusive, or down-
right disturbing body of work. We hope that our selection will sur-
prise readers—those familiar with former translations and those
about to encounter Celan for the first time—as we ourselves were sur-
prised by the range of Celan’s imagination, by the variety of poems he
was capable of writing in his last decade, and by the exquisite formal
discipline of those poems (written at a time of profound personal crisis).
Out of respect for Celan’s aesthetic control and integrity, we re-
stricted ourselves to poems for which we could find, in English, suf-
ficiently rich or opportune poetic resources to justify publication. No
one can reproduce in a language other than German Celan’s tragic
relation to the language which was his instrument and life, a lan-
guage that had remained silent through the horror. Like Büchner’s,
his words come to us framed by those invisible quotation marks that
always listen “not without fear, for something beyond themselves,
1. We had in mind such creditable collections as those published by Mi-

chael Hamburger, Joachim Neugroschel, Katharine Washburn and Margret
Guillemin, and Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky, as well as John Felstiner’s
translations and reflections on translating Celan.
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xii
beyond words.”2 The beauty, the daring, and the tragedy of Celan’s
poetry cannot be comprehended merely in terms of reference. (What
is “reference” in Celan?) We sought, cautiously, to create poems that
follow Celan’s intentional mode (Benjamin’s Art des Meinens), and
the intensity of his listening to language itself. Given the fundamen-
tals of Celan’s poetics (phono-graphic, grammatical, and rhetorical),
any attempt to isolate a “literal” meaning apart from those funda-
mentals would seriously impoverish and distort the effect of the
poems, both individually and as a whole. Everything in a poem is lit-
eral, that is, made of letters, blanks, and their interrelationships on
the page, and the literal is everything. Precisely this omnipresence of
the letter, and the depth of Celan’s probings into the matrix of his
“original” language, prohibit naive replications of line or meaning.
Celan’s word order in German is quite natural, but the same linear
order in English can sometimes misleadingly suggest experiments in
syntax where there are none, and so drown out other features of his
formal daring. In short, we often sought higher levels of fidelity than
those of the word, the line, or the individual poem: Working on a
fairly large body of poems allowed us to re-create, where possible in
English, effects that seemed characteristic of his art as a whole, for
example, Celan’s frequent use of paronymy not as an embellishing
but as a structuring device, or his way of wrenching a word apart so
that its parts would speak as loudly as the whole.
In the course of our sift, we threw out about a third of the approx-
imately one hundred and fifty poems translated in all—precisely in
the cases where we felt we had not advanced significantly beyond a
working version of mere meaning. The admirability of a poem in its
original German was a necessary but not a sufficient raison d’être for
its final inclusion in this book; its conduciveness to the resources of
English poetry had to meet a very high standard, too. In other words,
we required of ourselves extraordinary results in the target language:
Nothing short of that selectiveness seemed sufficient homage to
Celan himself.
2. Paul Celan, “The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the

Georg Büchner Prize, Darmstadt, 22 October 1960,” tr. R. Waldrop.
xii
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xiii
Because first and foremost we value the experience of the poetry,

we decided not to print the German texts en face. Both of us were
reluctant to encourage, in the process of fostering an international
readership’s acquaintance with Paul Celan, too early a recourse to
the kind of line-by-line comparison that fatally distracts attention
from what matters first: the experience of a poem’s coursing, cumu-
lative power. The serious scholar will have no trouble looking up the
poetic originals; the serious reader will have no objection to focus-
ing on a poem’s presence and integrity. Neither the one nor the
other will ever forget that, no matter how plausible a poem may
sound in its target language, it remains a poem in translation, an en-
counter marked by surprise, ambiguity, affection, and violence.
* * *
As a mysterious paradigm of the encounter between self and other,
the process of translation itself suggested the title for our enterprise.
The glottis is not a thing but an interstice: the space between vocal
chords. A glottal stop is, in Webster’s words, “the speech sound pro-
duced by momentary complete closure of the glottis, followed by ex-
plosive release.” Celan uses the term to end the poem “Frankfurt,
September”: “the glottal stop is breaking into song.” In this poem,
each of a series of obstructions gives way to a version of expression:
blindness to brilliance, flat rasters to 3-D sweat, lamentations to
open-mindedness, glottal stop to song. (One could say that the arc de-
scribed in the latter instance is that from linguistic precision to poetic
uncontainability.) Celan’s poetry abounds in motifs of the mother’s
death in a concentration camp: she died of a wound to the throat. If
utterances issue from a gaping hole, so too does blood: the place of
vulnerability is also the place of poetry.
xiii
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xiv
* * *
What need of Day—
To those whose Dark—hath so—surpassing Sun—
It deem it be—continually—
At the Meridian?
Emily Dickinson (#611)
Paul Celan’s own translations of Emily Dickinson are astonish-

ingly post-emptive: Dickinson is the star he starts from, not the one
he’s shooting for. Like Dickinson’s, his own is a work of opportune
attenuations—famously obscure, and famously oversimplifiable. Its
polysemies arise from architectonic terseness. To replicate such arts
in English, we had to bring to the occasion two quite separate sen-
sibilities. The partnership of a European-born literary scholar-
exegete and an American poet and translator brought, we believe,
unusual range and resource to the enterprise. Having worked to-
gether on Celan translations now for half of our married life, we are
not insensible of its status in (and perhaps as) the matrimonial tragi-
comedy. For where Celan combines traits of scholar and poet in a
single figure, we divvy it up, or duke it out. It is in the nature of
translation that it should provide a most congenial medium for con-
trary cooperation.3 In the course of our Celanian struggles we found
out how often the logomania of the one was at war with the
logician’s nature in the other. Effects one found diabolical the other
found divine; foundings the one divined, the other bedeviled. Where
one’s headlights were trained for clarification, the other loved the
half-lights. If one read first and foremost through the lens of intel-
lectual history and literary precedent, the other was big on
immediacy’s intricacies, the patterns of rhetoric, rhetorics of image:
parallels, counterpoises, serial effects. Our dispositions did some
chiastic entwining: The poet’s analytical acuity balanced and cor-
rected the scholar’s verbal high jinks (haunted by his memory of
having once been a translator of James Joyce). We were of several
3. As John Felstiner puts it, “in translating, as in parody, critical and

creative activity converge. The fullest reading of a poem gets realized mo-
ment by moment in the writing of a poem. So translation presents not
merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation.”
xiv
DES: one line long: folio dropped 7 points

Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xv
minds; we were consoled to know that so too was Celan. Ultimately

the domestic battles between reason and what la raison ne connait
pas were representative of his own psychomachies: Celan wrestles
with angels of both realms.
But his premises are never merely dualistic. They comprehend
desert and open ocean, glacier and swamp—inhospitable landscapes
that exert peculiar pressures on the human visitor. Celan can make
earth itself seem an alien place. And just wait till you see Celanian
space: The poems are uncommonly satel-lit, mother-shipped,
moon-probed, tele-commed. His eye is alert to its own instruments
(like Spinoza, he sees the world through the structure of a tear) and
his views assume a global curve. Passing whether across philosophy
or physics, theology or military logistics, his eye takes due note of
the sensual details, zooming from electron microscopy’s expanses all
the way to the intimacies of interplanetary camerawork; from the
closest big dark cells of politics or sex, all the way to the soul’s own
smallest far-flung star.
Among the jargons at his casual disposal are those of jurisprudence
and geology, anatomy and neurophysiology, nautical and aeronautical
navigations, heavy industry and manufacturing, biotech and electron-
ics, cabbalistic esoterica, philological finesses. You can find, in these
poetic reliquaries, such odd bedfellows as karst and carpel, korbel and
syncope, saxifrages and sporangia, raised bogs and swan ponds. There
are brain mantles, nerve cells, auditory canals, X-rays. There are con-
veyor belts and pressurized helmets, mine shafts and shower rooms.
Lines of communication are bundled with tricks of synapse; mainstays
can’t be untied; brain-waves are made in rain-pools. Celan has a lot of
gray matter in his hold, and he’s bailing like mad. (Surely he under-
stood Beckett’s definition of tears as “liquefied brain.”)
For all the otherworldliness of these poems, there’s a distinctively
Celanian atmosphere. Ominous with flashing and floating signs,
ashen words and sinking letters, numerals blown about in wind, it
sometimes seems a domain of gamblers, Kabbalists, palm-readers,
jugglers and tightrope walkers: domain of oddities and omens. There
are whiffs of the famously biographical topoi of the camps (the gas
and shower facilities, the dishes of the dead); evocations of his mur-
dered mother, severance at every throat and windpipe. It would be
xv

Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xvi
easy for a biographizing sensibility to read his literary aporias into

only that connection. But all is not so easily stylizable: consider, for
example, the fierce array of female figures in the poems, especially of
the darker muses: venomous vamps, festering fecundities. (Among
the features of a Celanian carnality are its undermined grounds—or
underground mind: The roots of the sexual seem to be set in moist
mephitic places for which the poet feels, as often as not, an undis-
guised disgust. Look at the corrupted love song he calls “Haut
Mal”—in which he apostrophizes his black-tongued, foul-mouthed,
all-but-coprophagic mate. It’s a poem that begins in soot and sex,
and ends in sacrilege. It’s so illicit it’s delicious.) Words may be
“dirty” precisely because of the mud in man’s mouth: Man is a crea-
ture of soil, whether proceeding from dust to dust—or from the light-
ning bolt to the puddle.
Having relegated the hermeneutic particulars of allusion and
side-reading to our notes (at the back of the book), we’ll mention
here only a few of the force-fields in Celan-land that from the very
first attracted our explorer-instincts, the ones that made Celanian
realms seem crucial to a reader today. (Already in mid-century Celan
was seeding the poems with millennial references. Like Dickinson,
perhaps he sensed the proleptic nature of the work a brilliant poetry
performs, creating a readership the poet will not live to see.) Celan
himself refers to his work as a kind of “spectral analysis”—a scientific
term that does not for a moment diminish the mysteries of its appli-
cation to (and as) poetry. It is a peculiar sort of sensory materializa-
tion one finds in lines like these: “white, white, white, / like paint on
pickets / the laws line up / and march right in.” (In German the word
“white” is only a whisper away from the first-person present form of
the verb “know,” thus from the shades of gray matter.) In another
poem, gray-greenishness is “dug out” from a well—a characteristic
materialization of the search for something beyond the evidentiary
surfaces. If Celan’s a spiritual seeker, he’s doing it with dredges,
shovels, mining equipment, scoops, claws, and light-probes, examin-
ing body and mind for physical evidence of God, to materialize
whose name would be idolatry. Elsewhere emotions are gouged from
a landscape as nominalized color (“gray-white of sheer / excavated
feeling”). It’s the mind that does the feeling. The hand is all eyes.
xvi

Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xvii
At times, the landscapes of man and mind and language seem syn-
onymous. The remarkers may be moved, the markers may float (even
continents and anchors shift; there are forms of tug and barge for
moving meaning), but at the bottom of it all, past the shells and slimes
of ultimate (or originary things), there’s something unspeakable.
Sometimes the Celanian pool is a stone-gray surface (across
which felt and faithful swans may steer their way). On one poem’s
stone surface appears lettering, beneath which Celan imagines a
“deep brother-letter,” to put us in several minds at once: of lapidary
inscription’s role in human memory, and also of the prospective
(and projective) force of language itself, making its attempts on the
timeless. From the surface folds or levees of the stream of conscious-
ness, we should not then be surprised to find ourselves fallen into
the fossae (or ditches) of the brain, where anatomical nomenclature
places the “calamus scriptorius”—near the center that controls
breath: These are characteristic Celanian premises: the stone in the
head, the stab-wound in the throat, words that hurt. Stich4 is stab in
German, but it means a line of verse in Russian (Celan jocoseriously
referred to himself as a Russian poet in the realm of German infi-
dels). In German, the word for letter (the letter of a word) is Buch-
stab (book-staff). The Runic sticks and stones that hurtle across
these networks of etymology and morphology are dear, in every
sense, to a Celanian temperament: As a poet-philosopher, he suffers
the materiality of language; as a son and husband and father, he suf-
fers the dematerializations of love. Through the polyglot exile’s sev-
eral homes (German, Rumanian, Russian, French, and English)
wander many ghost-guests and gists. They amount to a memory, and
morphology, of meaning.
Even in the strictest technical vocabularies he frequents, Celan
favors those concerned with seeing things through, or seeing
through them: He is attracted to the lensgrinder’s craft (perhaps be-
cause of Spinoza), and to the realms of X-ray technicians (a ghostly
science if ever there was one). What happens to the metaphysician
after Dachau is a famous question. What happens to the physician
4. From the Greek stikhos; hence “distich” and other prosodic terms of
Greek origin.
xvii

Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xviii
after Mengele is not so often asked. But it is that question that drives
the closer to the heart of Celan’s excruciations. He’s a serious sensu-
alist, in whose hands spirit’s question must be retooled for ever
more exquisite senses of sense, ever more painful instrumentalities.
However fundamentally mental may be Celan’s vertiginous moves
across space and time, he’s never any the less fascinated by the ma-
terial markers of the moved mind: its Doppler effects and red shifts.
Suffering has a cerebral cortex; the grim reaper sports a brain man-
tle. Grau means gray, in German; but Grauen means horror.
“Acephalic by choice” he calls the Thou-less tribe. His outcry is
of inwit, a nightmare’s EEG. God’s rod and staff, far from being a
comfort, are rather (like retinal structures and letter-formations)
made to make us see: see with the mind’s eye, if no other—the same
eye, says Meister Eckhart, through which God sees us. The infinite
sands come to be ground through the hourglass; where time is con-
tained, it also runs out. The watch-crystal gives its name to a form of
quaking bog; the message in the bottle is stoppered; the wind-rose
(a compass at sea) is disoriented. Under glass, the eye looks back: It
sees that it cannot see. “Right away, / the teardrop took shape—.”
“Your destination the one / precise crystal.”
Paul Celan died by drowning. He did it not just reflexively, but
transitively: He died by drowning himself. As figures of flotation and
immersion recur throughout the poems, particularly those that refer
to writing, it is natural that—like so much else in the Celanian leg-
end—those figures come to seem fatefully proleptic. (As subjects and
objects of our own regards, readers and writers of our own lives, we
hold out as long as we can—like “dreamproof tugs—each / with a
vulture-claw / towing a part / of the still- /unsunken sign.”) Paul
Celan’s attraction for readers today may be deeply ideogrammatical:
He made himself a glancing stroke, a winking wave, withdrawal’s
sign. As waters rise toward iris-level, as the eye-globe is covered, a
greatening force of mind informs the sensual field. In the face of
grief, in the light of death, in the vale of tears, what does intellect
do? Of sinking things, thinking sings.
h m, n p
Seattle, 1999
xviii
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xix
glottal stop
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page xx blank
Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page 1
Voices, scored into

the waters’ green.
When the kingfisher dives,
the split second whirs:
What stood by you

appears on every shore
mown down
into another image.
* * *
Voices from the nettles:
Come to us on your hands.

All you can read, alone
with a lamp, is your palm.
* * *
Voices, night-knotted, ropes

on which you hang your bell.
Dome yourself over, world:

when death’s shell washes up on shore
a bell will want to ring.
* * *
1
Voices that make your heart

recoil into your mother’s.
Voices from the hanging-tree
where old growth and young growth
exchange rings.
* * *
Voices, guttural, amid the debris,

where even infinity shovels,
runnels of
(cardio-) slime.
Launch here the boats I manned,

my son.
Amidships, when an evil wind takes charge,

the clamps and brackets close.
Jacob’s voice:
The tears.
Tears in the eye of my brother.
One clung. It grew.
We live in there.
Now, breathe—
so it may
fall.
* * *
Voices inside the ark:
2
Only
the mouths
were saved. Hear us,
o sinking things.
* * *
No
voice—
late noise, stranger to the hour,
gift to your thoughts, born of
wakefulness here in the final
account: a
carpel, large as an eye, and deeply
scored: bleeds
sap, and won’t
heal over.
3
Summer Report
No longer crossed, the carpet of thyme

is bypassed instead.
A blank line beaten
through the heather.
No windfall in the storm swath.
Encounters once again with

scattered words, like
riprap, scrubgrass, time.
4
With wine and being lost, with

less and less of both:
I rode through the snow, do you read me,

I rode God far—I rode God
near, he sang,
it was
our last ride over
the hurdled humans.
They cowered when

they heard us
overhead, they
wrote, they
lied our neighing
into one of their
image-ridden languages.
5
Threesome, Foursome
In the dooryard, puckered mint,

you pucker back, you leaf a hint.
Mind this hour, it is your time,

mine the mouth and yours the rhyme.
Mine’s the mouth, though it is still,

full of words that will not fill.
Some spell narrowness, some breadth,

all recall the brush with death.
I make one, and we make three,

one half bound, one half free.
In the dooryard, puckered mint,

you pucker back, you leave a hint.
6
Erratic
Evenings delve
into your eye. Lip-
picked syllables—
a lovely voiceless circle—
help the creeping star
into their ring. The stone, once
close to the temporal zones, now opens up:
my soul, you were

in the ether with all
the other
scattershot suns.
7
Hand-
like, shadowy,
it showed up with
the blades of grass:
right away—downheartedness, you

potter!—the hour provided
clay, right away
the teardrop took shape:—
then once again it hemmed us in

with its panicle of blue, this new
today.
8
To one who stood outside the door, one

evening:
to him
I opened my word—: off to
the ugly changeling he trudged, I saw him, to the
mis-
begotten one, to the brother
born in a muddy mercenary’s
boot, to the
twittering homunculus
with God’s bloody
phallus.
Rebbe, I gnashed my teeth, Rebbe

Loew:
cise
this one’s
word, write
the living
nothing-
ness into
this one’s
heart, spread
this one’s
two crippled fingers into a healer’s
benediction.
This one’s.
9
. . . . . . . . . . .
And Rebbe, slam shut evening’s door.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Rip open morning’s, Re—
10
Flung wood
on the windpipe’s path,
so it goes, wing-
powered,
true,
taking off
along star-trails, kissed
by world-
shards, scarred
by time-
grains, time-dust,
your orphan sibling, lapilli, turned
dwarf, turned tiny, turned
to nothing,
gone away and done away, self-
rhyme—
and so it comes
back home,
in its turn re-
turns, to
hover on
a heartbeat, one
millennium, the only
hand on the dial
that one
soul—its own soul—
described, that
one
soul numbers
now.
11
How low could it go, my once-immortal word—

falling into the sky-pit right inside my skull,
the starflower now abides with me
accompanied there by spit and muck.
Rhymes in the night-house, breath in the dreck,

eye a slave to images—
and yet: staunch silence, rock
that vaults the very Devil’s Stairway.
12
Pain, the Syllable
It gave itself into your hand:

a You, deathless,
where all self encountered itself. There was
a vortex of voices without words, empty forms,
and all went into them, mixed,
unmixed and
mixed again.
And numbers were

interwoven with the
Innumerable. A one, a thousand and what
before and after
was larger than itself,
and smaller, and full-
blown, and turning
back and forth into
the germinating Never.
Forgotten things
grasped at things to be forgotten,
earthparts, heartparts
swam,
they sank and swam. Columbus,
mind-
ful of the immortelle, the mother-
flower,
murdered mast and sail. And all put out to sea,
13
exploratory,
free,
and the wind-rose faded, shed
its leaves, and an ocean
flowered into shape and sight, in the blacklight
of a compass gone berserk. In coffins,
urns, canopies
the children woke up—
Jasper, Agate and Amethyst—nations,
tribes and kinfolk, a blind
let there be
tied itself into

the snakeheaded free-
coil—: a knot
(a counter knot, anti-knot, tauto-knot, double knot, and thou-
sand knot) at which the deep’s
carnival-eyed litter
of star-martens,
letter by letter,
nib-, nib-, nib-
bled.
14
La Contrescarpe
Break the coin of breath

from the air around you and the tree:
anyone
hope
trundles up and down
Heart-Hump Road
must pay this toll—any-
one
at the turning-point
where he faces the spike of bread
that has drunk up the wine of his night, misery’s
wine, wine of the king’s
wakefulness.
Didn’t the hands come along, holding their vigil,

and the happiness
deep in their cup,
didn’t it come?
Didn’t the March-pipe,
ciliated, come
with human sound that let there be light
at that time, from afar?
Did the dove go astray, could her ankle-band

be deciphered? (All the
clouding around her—it was legible.) Did the
covey countenance it? Did they understand,
and fly, when she did not return?
15
Roof-pitched slipway—that which floats

is laid down in dove-keel. The message bleeds
through the bulkheads,
every expiry
goes overboard too soon:
Upon arrival in Berlin,

via Krakow,
you were met at the station by a plume of smoke,
tomorrow’s smoke already. Under
the Paulownia trees
you saw the knives erect, again,
sharpened by distance. There was
dancing. (Quatorze
juillets. Et plus de neuf autres.)
Cross Cut, Copy Cat, and Ugly Mug
mimed your experiences. Wrapped
in a banner, the Lord
appeared to the flock. He took
a pretty little sou-
venir: a snapshot.
The auto-
release, that was
you.
O this friend-
making. And yet, again,
you know your destination—the one
precise
crystal.
16
Floated down blackwater rapids,

past the sheen of
scars, are
forty trees of life,
completely stripped.
Upstream swimmer, woman, you alone
number them each, you touch them all.
17
Gray-white of sheer
excavated
feeling.
Beach-grasses scattered
here inland
blow sand patterns over
the smoke of wellside songs.
An ear, cut off, is listening.
An eye, cut into strips,

does justice to it all.
18
(I know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low.

You hold me—I’m the riddled one—in bondage.
What word could burn as witness for us two?
You’re my reality. I’m your mirage.)
19
Singable remainder—trace
of one who—mute,
remote—broke out of bounds
through sicklescripts of snow.
Headed for the residue of a gaze

revolving under comet-
brows,
a tiny darkened heartmoon
packs the spark it caught
at large.
—Foreclosed mouth, report back

any stirrings still
not far from you.
20
Flooding big-
celled sleepyard.
Every partition overrun

by squadrons of gray.
The letters breaking out of line,

last
dreamproof tugs—each
with a vulture-claw
towing a part
of the still-
unsunken sign.
21
Go blind at once, today:

eternity too is full of eyes—
what helped the images
overcome their coming
drowns there;
there the fire goes out of
what spirited you away from language
with a gesture you let happen
like the waltz of two words
made of pure fall, silk, and nothing.
22
Ring narrowing Day under

the heavenleaf’s web of veins.
Across large cells of empty time, through
rainfall, climbs
a black-blue thing: the
thought-beetle.
Words in blood-bloom
throng before his feelers.
23
At high noon, in
a humming of seconds,
to the round grave’s shadow where I lie
already in my chambered pain
you come—for two days
of ochre and red
I spirited you off
to Rome with me
—sliding over thresholds, leveled, bright:
arms, only the arms that circle you

are visible. This much
of a mystery
I could muster still, in all’s despite.
24
The hourglass buried

in peony-shadow:
when my thoughts finally come down

Pentecost Lane
they will inherit the Reich
where,
trapped in sand, you still
get whiffs of air.
25
Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep—

our shanty is no secret—
our dream had swelled, cocky, fiery, in spite of everything,
and just as I drove gold nails into
that morning,
floating coffin-perfect down the stream
royally the rods shot down, divining

water—water came out!—
boats tore into macrosecond Memory,
slime-muzzled creatures drifted abroad—
no heaven yet had caught so many—
what a seine you were, really,
you so torn apart!—the creatures drifted, drifted,
horizons of salt
rose in our eyes, far out
in the abyss where a mountain was forming,
my world was calling yours
its own, forever.
26
Go back and add up

the shadows of all the steps
to that orchid—behind five hills of boyhood—
from there I’d win back
my half-word for twelve-night, from there
my hand would come to seize you
forever.
A little disaster helps, tiny as

the heartstop I
put after your eye
when it stammers my name.
You come too,

as if over pastures,
and bring along an image: gamblers
on the wharf.
Our housekeys were crossing each other
in a coat of arms, breaking the law;
meanwhile strangers were shooting craps
with what was left of
our language,
our lot.
27
Half-mauled, mask-
faced, a corbel-stone
deep
in the eyeslit-crypt:
inward, upward, toward

the cranial interior,
where you turn heaven over and over
in furrow and fold
he plants his image.
It outgrows itself, it grows out.
28
From fists white with the truth

of the beaten word-wall
a new brain breaks into bloom.
Beautiful, never ever to be veiled,

it casts the shadows
of its thought.
Twelve mountains, twelve brows,
shape up
in its steadfastness.
Even sadness,
your starry-eyed
gypsy, knows this place.
29
Noisemakers shoot into the light: it’s the Truth

breaking the news.
Over there, the river-

bank is rising against us;
a black-lit
macro-mass—the
houses resurrected!—
raises its voice.
One ice thorn—even we

had cried out—
collects the clamor.
30
You forget you forget

the words turned flint in the fist,
flashes of punctuation
crystallize
at your wrist,
out of the earth’s

cracked crests,
pauses come charging,
there, at
the sacrificial bush
where memory flares up,
you two are taken
in One breath.
31
Crackpots, decomposing
deeps.
If I were—
well, yes, if
I were that ash tree—bent
which way?—outside
I’d be able to
go along with you,
bright pan of gray, you and
the image growing through you
only at once to be
choked down,
and the two of you
caught
in the flashy, tight-drawn
noose of thought.
32
Lichtenberg’s heir-
loom: twelve
nap-
kins and a tablecloth:
a celestial salute
to the ring
of fast
fading language
towers
inside the sign
zone.
All
—there’s no heaven, no
earth, and the memory of both
is blotted out
down to one blue nut-
hatch trusting in the ash tree—
he had:
a white comet
picked up from the city ramparts.
A glottis, a voicecrack,
keeps it
in the uni-
verse.
33
Short
Red: the loss

of thought-thread. The wailings
over it, the wailing
under it—whose voice is it?
In other words—don’t ask

where—
I’d almost—
don’t say where or when, again.
34
The sight of the songbirds at dusk,

through a ring of
ungraphed space,
made me promise myself weapons.
The sight of weapons, hands;

the sight of hands, the line
long since described by a flat, sharp
rock,
—you, wave,
carried it here, sharpened it,
you, Un-
losable One, gave yourself to it,
you, beach-sand, are the taker,
partaker,
you, shore-grass, drift
your share—
the line, the line

we swim through, twice each
millennium, tied up
in each other,
and not even the sea,
sublime unfathomable sea
that runs alive through us,
can believe
all the singing in our fingers.
35
Gurgling, then
vegetating quiet on the riverbanks.
One sluice left. At the

wartlike tower, glazed with
brine, you disgorge.
Ahead of you, where

giant sporangia paddle,
a luster sickles—
as if words were gagging there.
36
Frankfurt, September
Blind wall-space,
bearded by brilliances.
A dream of a cockchafer
sheds light on it.
Behind that, raster of lamentations,

Freud’s forehead opens up:
the tear
compacted of silence
breaks out in a proposition:
“Psycho-
logy for the last
time.”
The pseudo-jackdaw
(cough-caw’s double)
is breakfasting.
The glottal stop is breaking

into song.
37
Staged happenstance, the signs all

unconsigned to wind, the number
multiplied, wrongs wreathed,
the Lord a closet-fugitive, rainfaller, eyeballer,
as lies turn blazing sevens, knives
turn flatterers, crutches
perjurors, U-
under
this
world,
the ninth one is already tunneling,
O Lion,
sing the human song of
tooth and soul, the two
hard things.
38
Who
rules?
Our life—color-beleaguered, number-beset.
The clock
wastes time with the comet,
the knights
are anglers,
names
cover frauds with gold-leaf,
the hooded jewelweed
numbers the dots in the stone.
Pain as a snail’s shadow.

I hear it’s not getting later at all.
Here Bogus and Boring, back in the saddle,
set the pace.
Instead of you, there are halogen lamps.

Instead of our homes, light-traps,
terminus-temples.
Diaphanous, black,
the juggler’s pennant
is at its
lowest point.
The hard-won Umlaut in the unword:

your light reflected: tunnel-shield
for a local
shade of thought.
39
Spasms, I love you, psalms,
O semensmeared one, feelwalls

deep in the gulch of you exult,
You, eternal, uneternitized,

eternitized, uneternal you,
selah,
into you, into you

I sing the scarscore of the bone-staff,
O red of reds, strummed far behind

the pubic hair, in caves,
out there, round and round

the infinite non of the canon,
you throw at me the nine-times-

twined
and dripping wreath
of trophy teeth.
40
Night in Pau
Henry IV rocking
in the royal tortoiseshell cradle:
immortality’s number.
In its wake, it made
an eleatic mocking.
41
Later in Pau
In the corner of your eye,

stranger, the shadow of
the Albigenses—
after
the Waterlooplein market,
I’m singing of you
to the unmatched
canvas shoe, to the
Amen that gets hawked off with it,
in the lot
that’s vacant for eternity; singing
you away:
so that Baruch, who never

cried,
may grind
around you his
precision-beveled
uncomprehended, all-seeing
tear.
42
The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion:
two pans of the scale

come by it,
in turns, both at
the same time, conversing.
Heaved to heart-height,
my son,
the law wins.
43
Lyon, Les Archers
Bristling in the brick

recess, the iron spike:
the neighboring millennium
with-
drawing into its otherness, unforthcoming,
follows
your wandering eyes.
Now,
the thrown dice of your glances
waken your neighbor,
she gets heavier
and heavier.
You, too, with all

your otherness,
with-
draw,
deeper and
deeper.
One
String
stretches its pain under you both.
Oh bow, the missing target

looms.
44
Sleep-pieces, wedges
driven into nowhere:
we remain constant,
steered round,
the star
concurs.
45
Attached to out-cast
dream relics, Truth
comes down, a child,
over the ridge.
In the valley,
buzzed-about by
clods of earth,
by spray of scree,
by seeds of eye,
the crutch
leafs through the
No that blooms
crown-high.
46
Graygreens
from nearby water-shafts
dug out by unawakened hands:
the depths
yield up their growth
without resistance,
without a sound.
Save it,
before
the Stone Day has blown dry
the swarms of men
and beasts, just
as the seven-reed flute mandates,
in front of mouth and muzzle.
47
Chitin sunlings,
newly hatched.
Armored amphibians
wrap themselves up
in blue prayer-shawls, the sand-
dependent gull calls out in the
affirmative, the furtive
fire-leaf
thinks things over.
48
Eternities dead
and gone,
a letter touches
your still-un-
injured fingers,
a shining countenance
comes somersaulting in
and touches down in
smells, sounds.
49
Hothouse of an asylum
emptied out by
prayers;
pretty little saxifrage
growing in the
grouting;
a glazed look
dozes through
the half-opened
door;
an over-
aged syllable comes
gangling in—
woken up,
the blind man’s cane
points out its place
behind the manes of the white horses.
50
Lucky, the
mummy-leap over the
mountain.
Lonely, the giant

paulownia leaf
that makes a note.
Big toy worlds are

left lying about. Stars
entirely idle.
In their control towers

one hundred silver hooves
hammer free the outlawed light.
51
On the rainsoaked rutted road, silence,

the gleeman, delivering his little sermon.
As if you could hear.

As if I still loved you.
52
White noises, bundled

light-
lines
over the table
with its message-in-a-bottle.
(Listening in, listening in to

an ocean, drinking it in, in
addition; removing the veil
over road-weary
mouths.)
One secret
gets mixed into the word forever.
(Whosoever falls therefrom
rolls beneath a leafless tree.)
Audible-inaudible:
all the
shadow-stoppers
logging on
at all the
shadow-links.
53
Your heart manholed

for the installation of feeling.
Your great motherland made

of prefab parts.
Your milk-sister
a shovel.
54
Here are the industrious

mineral resources (domestic)
here the heated-up syncope
here the insoluble riddle

of the jubilee year
here the glassed-in

spider altars in the facility’s
overarching sprawl
here the half-sounds

(still there?),
shades’ palaver
here the ice-adjusted fears

cleared for flight
here the semantically X-rayed

sound-proof shower-room,
with its baroque appointments
here the unscrawled wall

of a cell:
live your life right

through here, without a clock.
55
When I don’t know, when I don’t know,

without you, without you, without a You,
they all come,

acephalic by choice,
the brainless life-laureates
of the Youless
people of the lord:
Ashrei,
a word with no meaning,

transtibetan,
ejaculated into
the helmeted ovaries
of Pallas
Athena
the Jewess,
and when he,
he,
foetal,
strums a Carpathian not-not,
then the
Allemande
starts tatting
her im-
mortal self-sick
song.
56
Gigantic,
trackless, tree-
studded
hand-
tract,
Quincunx.
The branches, guided by nerves,

swoop down on
the already
red-tipped deep shadow,
a snakebite before
Rose-
rise.
57
Day freed from demons.

All breeze.
Disenchanted, the powers-that-be

sew up the stabbed lung.
Blood pours back in.
In Böcklemünd cemetery, the

hammershine from
infinity
races over the
shallow inscription on the front,
also over you,
deep Brother Letter.
58
Husks of the finite, stretchable—

and inside each
another shape takes root.
One thousand isn’t yet

once one.
Each arrow you shoot off

carries its own target
into the decidedly
secret
tangle.
59
Wet from the world

the scrapped taboos—
and all the bordercrossings between them,
pursuing
meaning, fleeing
meaning.
60
Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids.

Eyeflash, aim ahead.
61
Eyeshot’s island, broken

into heartscript
in the quick of night, faintly lit
by an ignition key.
Even this seemingly

starstudded altitude
is overcrowded
with destination-driven forces.
The wide-open stretch we longed for

hits us head-on.
62
Eternity gets older: at

Cerveteri the asphodels
worry one another white
with questions.
Their ladles murmuring

over stone, over stone,
they spoon out soup
in all the beds
in all the camps
from dead men’s dishes.
63
It’s late. A spongy fetish

eats the cones off the Christmas tree;
a wish frisks after them

roughened up by
aphorisms of frost;
the window flies open; we’re outside;
the bump of Being

will not level out;
a nose-heavy
stunt-happy cloud
carries us above it
and away.
64

nerve cells
from the
rhomboid
fossae
—multipolar duckweed,
ponds spotlit till blank—
From still-reachable centers

ten fibers drag
half-recognizable things.
65
Free of dross, free of dross.
If we were blades now,

drawn as of old
in the pergola in Paris, one eyeglow long,
the arctic bull

would come bounding down
and crown its horns with us
and gore and gore.
66
Soul-blind behind the ashes,

in the sacro-senseless word,
the rhyme-stripped one comes striding,
brain-mantle draped over his shoulders,
auditory canal ringing

with networked vowels,
he decomposes the visual purple,
he composes it.
67
Next-door-neighbor Night.
Dwarf or giant-sized—it all
depends on the cut in the fingerpad,
on what
comes out of it.
At times super-eyed
when biconcave
a thought, out of elsewhere,
comes dripping in.
68
The ropes, stiff with salt water:

this time
the white
mainstay can’t be untied.
Nearby, on the sandbar’s eelgrass,

in the anchor’s shadow,
a name makes fun of the
untwinned
riddle.
69
Out of angel flesh, on

Insufflation Day, in
phallic union with the One
—He the enlivener, He the just, made you sleep to me,
sister—,
we stream up through the channels, up
into the crown of roots:
parted,
it lifts us high, makes us co-eternal,
brain at hand, a bolt of lightning
sews up our skulls, the pans
and all
the bones not yet disseminated:
seed scattered in the East to be gathered in the West, co-eternal—,
where this writing burns, after

three-quarters death, before
the tossing and turning scrap
of a soul that
quakes with crown-fear
ever since ever began.
70
Upholster the word-hollows

with panther pelt,
enlarge them, furback and furforth,

senseback and senseforth,
give them vestibules, ventricles, valves,

furnish them with wilds, parietal,
and listen for the second,

every time their second, second
sound.
71
Walls of speech, space inwards—

wound into yourself,
you rave your way to the very last one.
The fogs burn off.
The heat sinks in.
72
Four ells of earth

orphaned in the storm-trough,
The heavenly logbook

blotched with ash,
Michael muck-mouthed,
Gabriel mire-gagged,
dough soured, in a stone flash.
73
Naked under death leaves,

their bodies both unsullied,
both defaced.
Pulled up on shore
by the whitest root of
the whitest tree.
74
Stone of incest, rolled away.
An eye cut out

from the doctor’s kidney
stands in for Hippocrates
at the cosmetic perjury.
Salvos, sleep-bombs, gold gas.
I’m floating, I’m floating
75
As loud colors, heaped up

in the evening, species of being
come back:
a quarter-monsoon
without a place to rest,
a hail of prayer
before inflamed
eyelidlessness.
76
The chimney-swallow, sister

to the arrow, stood at the zenith.
The One of the air-clock

flew at the hour-hand,
deep into its chime.
The shark
spat out the live Inca.
It was land-grab time

in the state of Humanity.
Everything went around

like us, with seals broken.
77
White, white, white

like paint on pickets
the laws line up
and march
right in.
78
Haut Mal
O irredeemable
beloved, sleep-attacked,
tainted by the gods:
your tongue is sooty,

your urine black,
your stool a bilious liquefaction,
like myself,
you use
foul language;
you put one foot before the other,

lay one hand atop the other,
burrow into goatskin,
consecrate
my cock.
79
The golfball growth

in the neck:
God’s arithmetical
brain-teaser
for the full-head
hairpiece,
a place
to test the one-
of-a-kind chest
pain, revealing
the future, blithe
as a fiber of steel.
80

is where you must live, granular, like a pomegranate
concealing
the crust of early frost,
with a darkening penstroke
across the goldyellow shadow of
your star-spattered wing—
yet you were never
only bird or fruit—
the supersonic wing
you
songed into being.
81
Who stood that round?
The weather was clear. We were drinking
aboard the great Wreck of the Solstice,

and singing the Shanty of Ash.
82
Audio-visual vestiges in
sleep ward 1001.
Night and day,

the Bear Polka:
they’re re-educating you:
you’ll be
a him
again.
83
Knock out
the chocks of light:
adrift, the word

belongs to dusk.
84
Eternities swept
over his face and
onward.
A blaze slowly extinguished

every wick and candle.
A green, out of this world,

covered with down the chin of
the stone, the one the orphans
kept burying and re-
burying.
85
She of the freckled farewells

is reading your palm
faster than
fast.
The blue of her Irish eyes is growing through her,

gain and loss
at once:
distance,
O you
hand of glances.
86
Degenerate
goddess:
spindly-limbed,
friend of grief,
between your genuflecting legs

a knowing knife
turns on
its axis,
contravening
the blood.
87
Assembly-
line facility:
razzle-dazzle in the half-dark,
—the healing hand lay

on you, remember, under the fit-
ful flares—
the protective word

in a pressurized helmet,
a punctuation mark
for fresh-air vent.
Soul-welding, arc-light.
In their cases,
the lovely rhymy metal bellows
are being given
artificial respiration.
88
Weather hand—
the bog puddle shows it the way
through the dark paludal wood.
Luminescence.
One who, one-

legged, pedals the peat organ bellows
gets for his efforts a bright shaft
of loss.
89
Nightsources, distant
destination-points
on god watch,
your slopes in the Thou

of the heart, O Brainmount,
are brimming with foam.
90
We always find ourselves

here,
my earth-mate:
unwashed, unpainted,
in the shafthead
of the beyond where
a
conveyor
running late
passes through us, through the cloud scatter,
up and down, up and down—
inside is insurgent
whistling, mischief
afoot—
against the iridescent orb

the flight shadow
scars us over at level
seven—
close to ice age

two swans of felt
steer around the floating
stone-icon
91
Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows,
Jacob’s star-staff over

Rubble Terminal,
time to play with matches, so far

no intercurrencies,
from a nice bar

to an ice bar.
92
You with the dark slingshot,

you with the stone:
It’s a night from today.

I cast a light behind myself.
Bring me down, get
serious with us.
93
I gave a chance
to your, even to your,
false-rung shade,
I lapidated it with my
true-shaded, true-
rung self—a
six-point star.
Today,
take quiet where you wish.
Trashing time’s
dishonored things, taking
no heart, I, even I, am already
going home, out into the street,
into the stony many.
94
Proverb on the Wall
Defaced (a renovated angel ceases to be)

a head comes into its own,
sharpsighted,
the astral
weapon
with its stock of memory
salutes
the
lions of its thought.
95
The aural apparatus drives a flower.

You are its year,
the world with no tongue
persuades you,
every sixth one
knows that.
96
Open glottis, air flow,

the
vowel, active
with its one
formant,
consonant concussions, the

evidence largely screened out,
shield against stimuli: consciousness,
unoccupiable
I and you, too,
superveri-
fied
the eye-greedy
memory-greedy
rolling
brand-
name,
the temporal lobe intact,

likewise the optic stem.
97
Raised bog, in the shape of

a watch-crystal (someone has time).
So many swallowtails, sick on sundew.
Out of the
drainage ditch
a menorah of mullein stands up.
Quaking bog, if you turn into turf

I’ll unhand the clockwork of
the Just.
98
Particles, patriarchs, buried

in the upheaval, spangles
of ore.
You make the most of things

with them,
as if angiosperms
were having a
forthright
word
with you.
Shofar traced in limestone.
In karst caverns
what is lost gains
rarity, clarity.
99
And force and pain

and what pushed
and drove and held me:
jubilee leap-
years,
rush of pine scent (once upon a time),
the unlicensed conviction

there ought to be another way
of saying
this.
100
A reading branch, just one,

feeding your forehead,
a source of light you

drowsily swallow
passes through the hungry
host-tissue,
seeing-aid, layer-streaked,
over the moon-touched
backscatter probes. Macroscale: microscale.
Still, there are earths, earths.

Cornea-coated basalt,
kissed by spacecraft:
cosmic
orbital-show, and yet:
landlocked horizons.
Terrestrial, terrestrial.
A reading branch, just one,

feeding the forehead—as if you were writing
poems—,
it lands on the picture-postcard—
that was before
the bloodclot, on the threshhold
of the lungs—a year away, greetings from Pilsen,
a year around,
time-wild from so much
quiet unfurling:
101
Bon vent, bonne mer,
a flapping
occipital lobe, a
glimpse of the sea,
is hoisting, right where you live,
its un-
conquerable
capital.
102

to happiness past
and its logistical
lines,
and ahead
in the cantonment areas
where they’re spraying wellness agents,
mild melodic antidotes
signal
the final sprint
through your conscience.
103
The splintering echo, darkened,

heading for
the brainstream,
hesitating
at the bend’s levee,
massive
absence of windows
over there,
take a look,
that pile
of idle supplications,
one
buttstock blow away
from the prayer-silos,
one and none.
104
Nowhere, with its silken veil,

dedicates its dureé to daytime,
here I can see

you.
Visitors can come and go, where you are—
sleeping unmonitored
under its sand-cap,
your brain
steers its way
through the one
unforfeitable
oceanic
day,
come, I’m brightening up,
come, my inbred one,

my heavy one,
I’m giving you
to me, and you to you, too.
105
In the most remote of

secondary senses, at the foot
of the paralyzed stairway of amens:
Existence, a phase
stripped bare.
Nearby, in the gutter,

common wisdoms
still wriggling.
Sleep secreted the contour,

dream fiber strengthened it.
At its single
heart-beaten temple
ice is forming.
No book opens up.
The Supernothing threw

its lot with me;
all ice,
it gives up the fight.
We’re ready
to trade away our mortal inmost.
No reply—the thorn
climbs up through the cradles.
Behind the time clock,

time, immune to fools,
is giving itself away.
106
O little root of a dream

you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.
Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,
even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter.
107
Don’t sign your name

between worlds,
surmount
the manifold of meanings,
trust the tearstain,

learn to live.
108
notes
Page 1: Voices, scored into

Celan worked on this untitled sequence of lyrics between 1956 and
1958. A polyphonic composition for seven voices and none (the
coda’s “No voice”), it inaugurates his 1959 collection Sprachgitter,
which ends with another major polyphonic composition, “Eng-
führung” (known in English as “Stretto” and “Straitening”). Celan
mimics the interweaving of voices in music by means of sonic and
semantic recall and anticipation. For example, in the third lyric,
the voices are bell “ropes” and in the next lyric this word begets the
image of a gallows; heart (Herz), invoked first in connection with the
mother, then parenthesized as part of an adjective in the sixth lyric,
recalls the “carpel” bleeding sap (Harz), in the coda; the typograph-
ical parentheses reappear as “brackets”—and so on. Aimed at what
is familiar and secure in the German language (from compound
words and common phrases to traditional poetic tropes), such a
poetic procedure begins with analysis of the word and ends in onto-
logical resynthesis of the world.
In his 1960 speech “The Meridian,” Celan discusses art as the
place where one can “set onself free as an—estranged—I” and gives
the example of Georg Büchner’s character Lenz who is “bothered
that he could not walk on his head.” A man who walks on his head,
Celan says, “sees the sky below, as an abyss.” Poetic existence par-
takes of the groundless and the grotesque. The shell of death in the
third lyric recalls an ancient Jewish burial device, a seashell carved
within a fret. Jacob’s brother is Esau. Martin Buber relates the
words of Schmelke von Nikolsburg to the effect that the Messiah
won’t come before Esau’s tears have ceased to flow: “The children
of Israel [. . .] shall they weep in vain, as long as the children of Esau
shed tears? But ‘the tears of Esau’—that does not mean the tears
which the peoples weep and you do not weep; they are the tears
which all human beings weep when they ask something” (Tales of
the Hasidim).
Page 5: With wine and being lost, with
Many of Celan’s later poetological studies are informed by the ten-
sion between voice (the traditional medium of the lyric) and inscrip-
tion. Voice, by definition, is single and always already articulated in a
specific tongue; a grapheme, on the other hand, can be shared by
several writing conventions. Celan’s own linguistic predicament gives

this commonplace a twist: All the languages he used were, in some
sense, foreign (Lacoue-Labarthe); none could provide the security of
an indubitably voiced lyric subjectivity. Hence, many poems contain
what one might call translingual effects. For example, in the poem at
hand, Neige means “remainder,” “end,” “dregs” in German; the
“same” grapheme in French spells the word “snow.” The phrase is
hardly over when snow literally befalls the poem in line 3. To the En-
glish eye, neige also moves in the nearness of “neigh” (God’s “song”!)
and its homonym “nay.” The latter, retranslated into a German verb
(negieren), brings us back, with a difference, almost to the place
where the translingual steeple-chase started.
A corresponding tension obtains between presentation and rep-
resentation. The representers, that is, those who busily and fearfully
make sense out of the sheer music of sound (animal? divine?), are
exposed as liars. One of the poem’s drafts suggests the proximity, for
Celan, of things understandable (verständlich) and things imaged or
illustrated (bebildert). Against the attempt to contain the music in
understandable transcription or visual images, the poem broadcasts
its iconoclastic resistance to reason and pours Nietzschean scorn on
the attempt to trap art—or divinity—in images. Translators, among
others, thus encounter a troubling image of their enterprise; hence
our commitment, here and elsewhere, as much to a translatorial re-
construction of meaning as to the phono-graphic fundamentals of
Celan’s poems.
German Wein, wine, is paronymically very near to weinen, cry,
weep; with regard to the poem’s poetology it’s worthwhile to re-
member Joel 1.5: “Awake, ye drunkards and weep; and howl, all ye
drinkers of wine, because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your
mouth.” It’s also noteworthy that Celan’s poem quotes from (alludes
to) the translation that institutes modern German, Luther’s Bible;
namely, from Jeremiah 25. And here translation runs into an aporia:
to translate a translation is not to translate precisely the fact that it is
a translation.
Page 6: threesome, foursome
The poem is a variation on a Romanian folksong pattern. Our trans-
lation foregrounds the self-reflexive language of the original. The
poem is also a part of Celan’s poetic dialogue with Nelly Sachs, in
Die Niemandsrose.
Page 7: erratic
An “erratic” boulder is one transported from its original place by a
glacier (geol.). In the sensibility of an exile battered and displaced
110
by history’s drifts, this scientific definition resounds with personal

pain. More generally, “stone” functions as a nodal grapheme and
metaphor in Celan’s work. Celan’s “language of the stone” (James
Lyon’s term) encompasses language drawn from the sciences of the
physical world: geology, mineralogy, crystallography, glaciation,
fossilization, etc., and probes sedimentations and enstonements in
language and myth, memory and the psyche. Indeed, Celan sees
the very tradition of European lyricism in terms of stone: from Pe-
trarca (whose name comes from “stone”) to Mandelstam (whose
first book was entitled Stone and who inspired some of Celan’s
most interesting work as a translator). Celan’s neologistic metaphor
Kriechstern sees the movement of a star, across a sky that is at once
crepuscular and languaged, in terms of slow glacial movement
(geol. creep = slow movement of rock debris down a weathered
slope). Celan’s notes for “The Meridian” shed further light on the
poetological significance of this poem: today’s poem seeks its initial
voice in muta cum liquida, the combination of voiceless and liquid
consonant.
Page 9: To one who stood outside the door, one
Inspired by the Golem legend, this enigmatic poem of creation and
transgression, language and ashes, echoes a variety of sources (in-
cluding Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”). Whatever its origins, the
poem leads to the center of Celan’s intense reflection on the other at
the self’s door (no less outside than already inside); on the essence
of art and language, and their fateful alignments with death; on the
human, the quasi-human, and the legion of ambiguous apparatuses,
automatons, and technologies straddling the life-death line.
In his “The Meridian,” Celan cites Lenz’s reflections on art
(“One would like to be the Medusa’s head” to seize the natural as
the natural by means of art), and comments: “Here we have stepped
beyond human nature, gone outwards, and entered a mysterious
realm, yet one turned towards that which is human, the same realm
where the monkey, the robots and, accordingly . . . alas, art, too,
seem to be at home.” (tr. Jerry Glenn)
The great Rabbi Loew of Prague (c. 1520–1609), apostrophized
by the speaker, is a legendary figure credited with the creation of the
Golem (lit. a “formless mass”), a clay humanoid endowed with life
but separated from death by next-to-nothing, a mere mark. As Gers-
chom Scholem glosses the legend in his study of the Kaballa and its
symbolism, the Golem lives by the inscription on his forehead of the
Hebrew word ‘emeth (truth); bereft of the aleph at the head of the
word, the Golem collapses into a pile of ashes (Heb. meth = (he is)
111
dead). The Hebrew word for “nothing(ness),” K. Reichert points

out, likewise begins with the mute aleph. The imperative to circum-
cise the word for the nameless and perhaps unnameable One-
outside-the-door (provided that all “one’s” in the poem refer to one
one) involves the extremes, on the one hand, of ritual acceptance
and life and, on the other, of rejection and death.
Pages 11: Flung wood
A “boomerang” shot “from Nothingness” into the bull’s-eye of a soul
appears in Celan’s earlier poem “But.” Lat. lapillus = little stone, esp.
voting pebble (white for acquittal, black for condemnation). With this
allusion, Celan’s boomerang of a poem “returns” to the first Euro-
pean poet of exile, Ovid. In Metamorphoses XV, Myscelus is com-
manded by Hercules to leave his own country, and the god’s com-
mand (accompanied by dreadful threats lest he disobey) puts him in a
mortal double bind, for the penalty for defection is death. Myscelus is
brought to trial; each pebble dropped in the urn is black, but when
the pebbles are poured for the count they are all white (Hercules has
interfered), and Myscelus is free. Celan’s interest in this allegory of exile
and death is understandable. Unlike the speculative return of spirit
to itself, Celan’s projectile returns utterly othered and bereft of origins
(un-referenced, as a latent pun in the original, heard by Hamacher,
suggests). There is no kill, no gain; indeed, apart from a pure indica-
tion of time, it is impossible to tell what, if anything, returns.
In a poem of literally attenuated and broken German (Celan’s
line-breaks often tear words asunder as if to emphasize that the site
of pain, the jointure that divides, is inside words), the rhyme
rhyme–home (Reim–heim) at the poem’s turning point seems to
mark the ruin of a poetics of homecoming. (As noted by Jerry Glenn,
this is no casual rhyme for Celan: It holds together the final distich
of his early poem “The Graves’ Nearness,” in which the speaker
asks his (dead) mother if she can still bear, as she once did, at home,
the painful soft German rhyme.)
Page 12: How low could it go, my once immortal word
“Bad language” (profanity, blasphemy, obscenity) frequently in-
trudes into the elegiac lyricism of Celan’s later poetry. Celan’s focus
on language as a whole, synchronically as well as diachronically,
leads him to a scandal that involves the fundamental philoso-
phemes and theologoumena of the European tradition. It would suf-
fice, at this point, just to remember the fervor invested in Hegel’s
early theological and other writings; for instance, “How could they
[the Jews] have an inkling of beauty who saw in everything only
matter?” And, even more to the point: “The Jewish multitude was
112
bound to wreck his [Jesus’] attempt to give them the consciousness

of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great,
cannot make its home in a dunghill. The lion has no room in a nest,
the infinite spirit none in the dungeon of a Jewish soul, the whole of
life none in a withering leaf &&&.” It would be idle to argue whether
Celan’s poem really “quotes” Hegel’s word Kot (dreck), even though
the incarnational metaphor that frames the whole poem suggests
more than a mere coincidence. This is Celan’s poetological anguish:
His poetic utterance or breath is in advance immersed in the lan-
guage of the aesthetic tradition Hegel speaks out of and for; can a
total release from it be purchased only as total silence?
But the question of voice (logos) and its (shit)house cannot be
resolved by a simple condemnation of Hegel’s language as a histori-
cal manifestation of (philosophical, Christian) anti-Semitism. Over
and beyond his own personal bias, Hegel could be said to give voice
to a fundamental, onto-theological, anxiety which is older than the
Christian topic of the incarnation and which makes anti-Semitism
historically possible: the anxiety, to cite another text of Hegel’s, that
“every animal finds a voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as
eliminated/superseded [aufgehobnes] self).” The animal voice is
thus, always already, the voice of death (Giorgio Agamben): the re-
sounding sound Herder heard at the origin of language. Voice pays
this mad toll to the infinite for its sojourn in matter.
The starflower (trientalis europea), native to the eastern Carpath-
ians, has seven points, hence its German name, seven-pointed star.
Flower, star, and poetic word constitute a central imagistic trinity, in
Celan’s work. In the present context, seven and star also recall the
Pleiades. If the inversion of the “natural” vertical turns heaven into
an abyss (see note to “Voices”), here the abyss is further interiorized
in a Rilkean conflation of cosmos and inner space, with the crucial
difference that the Celanian interior is a vile–brainy–body. Celan’s
ambivalence regarding the “immortal” poetic word is a fallout from
the poem immediately preceding the present poem in Die Nie-
mandsrose: In it, the poetic “you” observes “us” from the chalice of
a Ghetto-Rose, “immortal from so many deaths died on morning
paths.”
Page 13: pain, the syllable
This poem not only engages in dialogue Rilke’s majestic Tenth
Elegy but re-cants and re-spells the entire tradition of visionary
poetry in the West, its premises and means, its meanings, and the
meaningless. (The initial letters of the nouns in the original title
spell an ominous SS.)
113
The poem declares its ontological search with its very first words.
German Es gab (“it gave”) is also the idiom for the gift of being, a
dative dynamic missing from the English “there was.”
The flower of Columbus’s quest is the Colchicum autumnale (er-
roneously known, in English, as the autumn crocus), a flower with
an emblematic presence in Celan, on account of its poetic genealogy
and suggestive Latin and German names. Colchinium comes from
Colchis, the mythical land of the Golden Fleece, and was associated
with the black arts of its princess, Medea (it contains a poisonous al-
kaloid); later, the troubadours associated it with the menace of the
Lady’s eyes; in modern times, Apollinaire, whose poetry Celan cher-
ished and translated, revived the legend in “Les Colchiques.” The
German name of the colchinium means, literally, “timeless” (hence
its importance in a poem that explores history’s beginnings and
ends); it is also known as the “Naked Whore” and “Naked Virgin”
(both latent in connection with Columbus). As an ambiguous em-
blem of the entire European poetic tradition, the colchinium reflects
Celan’s own ambivalence vis-à-vis what he inherits and is outcast
from. Just a few lines later Celan explores—indeed, deflowers, re-
flowers—the anagogic Rosa Mundi. To capture some of the reso-
nances in Celan’s poem, we used another (unfortunately, innocent)
flower, the immortelle, hoping that the markers of time, death, and
privation/loss (todlos—Zeitlose; deathless—immortelle) will thicken
the translation’s texture in a manner suggestive of the original’s
richness.
At midpoint Celan constructs a complex spatio-temporal figure,
conflating rose season (fall) and time of day (nightfall). Further-
more, taking advantage of the term “wind-rose” (the face of the
compass), Celan projects an image of complete loss of orientation:
The wind-rose has lost its points/petals, become black/blank, so the
instrument of orientation is unruly and useless. And yet the burst of
nightbloom is a luminous dawn. Black light is, after all, a light, a
contralight (backlight)—the light of letters? As the poem’s further
progress indicates, this nautico-stellar wordscape recalls Mallarmé’s
Master, the Septentrion above his shipwrecked head, but Celan
doesn’t seem content with the ironic consolations of constellar art.
The precious stones that follow the imagery of new day refract a
variety of Judeo-Christian visionary texts and ancient rituals (Egyp-
tian burial practices); for example, in Revelations 21, the New Jeru-
salem has twelve foundations of precious stone, each kind of stone
corresponding to one of the twelve tribes. But for Celan the Apoca-
lypse (Auschwitz, the end of time) has already occurred; the annihi-
114
lation that makes his poetry possible also makes meaning well im-
possible—casts a shadow on any attempt to articulate a new world
vision.
The last lines of the original perform a characteristic Celanian
stutter, spelling—and stumbling at—the incommensurability between
pain and articulable language. Pain (a word conspicuously absent
from the body of the poem) gnaws away at the ends and means of
poetic inscription—even as it constitutes (spells) the poem’s condi-
tion of (im)possibility. In German this stutter (buch-, buch-, buch- /
stabierte, stabierte) follows the bimorphemic structure of the verb
buchstabieren (from Buch-stab, “letter”), which means “to spell.”
The ending also recalls Mallarmé’s puns “l’alphabet des astres” (in
“Quant au livre”), the “alphabet of stars,” which sounds like “al-
phabet disastre,” and “sur les cendres des astres” (in “Igitur”). The
density of self-reference and language involution in the poem’s fi-
nale suggested a number of parographic possibilities (e.g., a litter of
little alphabeasts in the alphabyss), but the question was to find a
rendition in tune with Celan’s pain-ful economy.
Page 15: la contrescarpe
Taking its title from Place de la Contrescarpe, Paris (Celan’s ulti-
mate station of exile), the poem recalls the public and private calen-
dars of the poet’s life story. As the foreign title indicates, it is
“about” the experience of being translated and dwelling in transla-
tion, a narrative struggling to make meaningful a foreign name,
place of exile. (Cp. Merrill’s “Lost in Translation.”)
Celan’s first trip to France (to study medicine) took place in
1938; by a fateful coincidence, his train stopped at Anhalter Station,
Berlin, on the morning after Kristallnacht (November 9/10, 1938),
which saw Nazi-led pogroms of Jewish synagogues, businesses,
schools, and homes throughout Germany. Nine years later—a Holo-
caust later, a hiatus of time history cannot recuperate but must not
be allowed to forget—in 1948, Celan will arrive at Place de la Con-
trescarpe again. The poem seems to center on a Fourteenth of July
(1948), from which it counts back nine years (nine other July
14th’s), to Celan’s first journey to France, and forward through four-
teen years of exile in Paris. This series of private and painful July
14th’s may be Celan’s grimly ironic comment on the emancipatory
hopes aroused by the French Revolution (the series of its public an-
niversaries, after all, leads through many horrors all the way to the
Russian Revolution and then the Holocaust); or an equally grim re-
minder that today’s mindlessly festive crowd may turn, tomorrow,
to orgies of hatred and destruction; and that historical crimes are
115
all-too-easily forgotten or distanced. The Celanian poem doesn’t

know the shelter of distance, historical or aesthetic. A crystal of
memory and breath, it always dwells on the verge of Kristallnacht.
The past is always imminent.
While the details of Celan’s life story have been ably recon-
structed (see John Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew), some
of the language of the poem remains open to conjecture in a way
that precludes even a remotely literal rendition. Two recent state-of-
the-art volumes, Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose: Vorstufen, Textge-
nese, Endfassung (Suhrkamp 1996) and Kommentar zu Paul Celans
“Die Niemandsrose” / hrsg. von Jürgen Lehmann (Heidelberg,
1997), address those conjecturable moments. As can be expected
from a work concerned with autobiographical reflection, the poem
alludes to other poems included in Die Niemandsrose, to Celan’s
early work, and to the work of Hölderlin, among others.
“All the clouding around her”: The cloud formation (Gewölk)
can be read as a condensation of cloud and people (Volk), the Jew-
ish people gone up in smoke. We count on English readers to hear
a hint of “crowding” around our gerund. Cp. Celan’s own com-
pound “das Volk-vom-Gewölk” (the “people of clouds”), which oc-
curs in the poem “Hüttenfenster” (separated from “La Contres-
carpe” only by “Pain, the Syllable”). Cp. also “Radix, Matrix” in
Hamburger.
Paulownia tomentosa (or princess tree) is an oriental tree with
paired heart-shaped leaves. Celan’s botanical knowledge is always
contextually relevant: The poem opens with a tree. The fact that the
poet shares his first name with the tree (Paulownia) should not go
unnoticed.
“Cross Cut, Copy Cat, and Ugly Mug” is an attempt to match
Celan’s inventive compounding of violence, aesthetic fraud and bes-
tiality. The “second coming” hinted at in the poem’s last lines has,
not the Yeatsian dimension of horror (“what rough beast”), but
rather an Arendtian disappointment at banality: The Lord has a
banner (like a politician) and a camera (like a tourist). So too the
Bible’s dove, which flew from the ark to find safety, here was never
able to come back with its branch of sign, and soon is lapped or
dovetailed into a keel of its own. But despite the sorry prospects, the
eye of the instrument itself (the lens of the camera, the watch-face
of time, and the mind’s own eye, which the observant poet trains
both inward and outward) cannot turn away: and it is trained on the
transparent, in order to sort semblance from resemblance, value
from value, crystal from crystal, breath from air.
116
Page 17: Floated down blackwater rapids

The feminine figure in the second stanza arises literally out of the
poem’s grammar, German being a gender-inflected language. Here
and in other similar cases, a zero-gender Engish noun won’t do
since that would lead to an identification, along gender lines,
between the figure addressed and the speaker. Without going into
the vexed and ultimately misleading question as to who Celan’s
“you” might be—Celan’s murdered mother, in some poems; Celan’s
wife, in others; an alter ego of the speaker, and so on—it suffices to
say here that the “you” is grammatically (and sometimes semanti-
cally) gendered as feminine. (We’ve added similar cue-words in
other poems to indicate imperative moods that otherwise might be
taken for effects of Celan’s characteristic comma-splicing.) The pos-
sibility that the you’s referent is not a human figure but an allegor-
ized abstract noun opens up intriguing interpretive paths (e.g., time
and language are feminine nouns in German, and this poem can be
read, metapoetically, as a poem “about” language and time), but
translated into English this possibility results in the pathetic fallacy.
Therefore, we resorted to an explicitly feminine human figure, well
aware that making explicit the implicit (e.g., the grammatical) limits
the readings.
Page 18: Gray-white of sheer
The sensory organs without their heads are figures of detachment
that recall a gallery of such organs including Van Gogh’s ear and
Buñuel’s sliced eye. Coming after such mixed sensory materials as
gray-white feeling and sand blown over smoke, these severed atten-
tions seem all the more (literally, etymologically) critical.
Page 19: (I know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low
The parentheses enclosing this poem suggest that it is an aside of
sorts, relative to the Atemwende poems immediately adjacent to it.
Despite the fact that our selection does not contain those two
poems, we decided to retain the parentheses whose muteness on the
massively white Celanian page is so eloquent.
Page 20: Singable remainder–trace
Among Celan’s jottings for the poem is the following: “Readable
outline—split, / bloodless lip.” But he went further, seeking a trope
that, rather than fix the sense exclusively, would allow of sense-in-
progress, from physical freezing and dismemberment to legal inca-
pacitation (barring the speaker from dialogue), so in his final ver-
sion the lip became entmündigte, from the legal term entmündigen,
to certify as incapacitated or rule as unable to testify; to put in guar-
dianship); read down into its morphemes, entmündigte also suggests
117
something of special “poetic” interest: bereft-of-mouth (for the

poet’s mouth logos and phusis are the same). We settled on “fore-
closed” as suggesting in a single word an effect at once juridical and
anatomical.
Page 21: Flooding, big
Verbally as well as in some particulars of spatial organzation, the lo-
cation of this poem (Schlafbau) recalls Kafka’s story “Der Bau.” Just
as in Kafka the subterranean quarters become indistinguishable
from the builder’s mind and narrative, in Celan’s poem events ap-
pear at once external and internal (inside a consciousness on the
verge of sleep), as well as intro-verbal. In other words, what occurs
on the level of the letter jells and dissolves our perception of both
inside and outside. In any case, the ambiguous events of this poem
reflect Celan’s constant search not for a language of transcendence
but for a transcendence of language—at least, of language as arbi-
trary signification, premised upon decidabilities of container and
content. Celan’s suspension of instrumental language is a step be-
yond so-called self-reflexive poetry: The sign (already conceived
here as graphic rather than phonic substance) is about to be scut-
tled and submerged under the reflective (narcissistic) surface, with
no hope for speculative return. All the poem’s events are in-vented.
The term Bau (construction, structure, etc.) has a wide range of
meanings; Kafka’s story is known in English as “The Burrow.” We
chose to render Celan’s rich, polyvalent neologism as “sleepyard,”
in keeping with the cluster of boatyard images and nautical associa-
tions. The bird-barge-letter formation comes from Homer, possibly
mediated by Mandelstam’s poem “Insomnia.” (Hermes invented the
letters of the Greek alphabet in imitation of the wedge-shaped for-
mation of cranes in flight.)
Page 23: Ring narrowing Day under
Celan opens this poem with a flourish, coining a tripartite com-
pound, Engholztag. His neologism has the structure of a word for a
calendar-day; moreover, the day in question is a day of “narrow an-
nulus”; that is, the coinage combines two of Celan’s nodal terms, the
ring and narrowness, into a figure of stunted growth and destitution.
In arboreal time, of course, a narrow annulus is the sign of a dry year.
The violent and beautiful logic of the metaphor thus collapses two
units of time, day (the punctual, the special moment) and year (the
cyclical, the repetitive). And this metaphoric collapse of scale leads
to further compacting of vastly different magnitudes as attention
swoops from the celestial to the cellular. The poem bases its economy
and music on the effects of passage through a place of constriction
118
(or Engführung, as the eponymous poem from Sprachgitter has it).

“Expand art?” asks Celan in “The Meridian.” “No: rather go with art
into your ownmost narrowness. And set yourself free.”
The ending of the poem is ambiguous: The constriction effect
has blurred the difference between blood and blossom, and it is sug-
gestively unclear whether (human?) words are endowed with ani-
mality (blood), are smeared with blood, or are not themselves blood-
thirsty carnivorous flowers (which elsewhere captivated Celan’s
attention: see “Raised bog”).
Page 25: At high noon, in
Another study in ring structures. The poem’s time, midday, literally
translates Celan’s nodal notion, the meridian, while the “round
graves” it alludes to are in the Etruscan necropolis at Cerveteri, near
Rome. A ring within a ring, the memory of a vanished race leads to
the lovers’ embrace, the encounter of self and (vanished) other, self
as other, the meeting of the circle—all “protagonists” are in a sense
sheer figures of time, that is, hours—always the same (cyclically) and
different (chronologically).
Page 25: The hourglass buried
The last line of this poignant miniature (“wo du versandend ver-
hoffst”) presents a major problem, in that it epitomizes an essential
aspect of the Celanian poetics. Verhoffen, etymologically derived
from “hope” and contradictorily glossed as “to hope fervently” or
“to give up hope”(!), is a venery term: an animal (e.g., deer)
verhoff ’s when it pauses, stockstill, alert, sensing the wind for dan-
ger, etc. The verb thus names a figure of time suspended or arrested;
here it is a figure inside the time piece. This characteristic Celanian
turn makes it impossible to think of the poem in terms of the “still
moment” or stasis of beauty outside time, as conceived by tradi-
tional aesthetics. That still moment (Verhoffen) of animal figure and
poem is the moment captured in Rilke’s “The Gazelle” (New
Poems). In “The Meridian,” Celan remarks that the poem verweilt
or verhofft at the thought of the “wholly other”; and, further, that no
one can say how long the Verhoffen or the “breath pause” can last.
(Verweilen = linger, tarry; it’s the verb of Faust’s bargain with the
devil.) In “The Meridian,” Celan himself dwells on the notion of
“hope” implicit in verhoffen; in the end, though, a suspensive ren-
dition of verhoffen seems better; a hope-ful Verhoffen would be quite
un-Celanian. The very ver- that prefixes Hoffen acts like a shadow
(of failure, error, loss, breakdown) in advance. The hourglass in the
poem perhaps, too, suggests that the gain in sand (silting) issues
from a loss of hope: a burial in sand.
119
Page 26: Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep

A lyrical interlude amidst the austere poems of Atemwende, this
poem revisits two of Celan’s early poems, “Night Ray” and “Stigma.”
In the former, the speaker sends his beloved “the coffin of lightest
wood. / Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in
Rome [. . .] A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feel-
ings” (tr. M. Hamburger). In the latter, the lovers lying in “the clock-
work of sorrow” bent “the hands like rods, / and they bolted back
and scourged time till blood was drawn” (tr. J. Neugroschel).
Celan interweaves those personal poetic reminiscences with other
motifs of his early work: sleep, voyage, alchemy (coal, gold), memory
(personal, Romania), history (crematoria). The poem is a parting ges-
ture toward the rich sensuousness of the early work, and even
though it reads as another tribute to the surrealist poetics that in-
spired it (Rene´ Char’s, among others), Celan’s ambivalence vis-à-vis
his earlier repertoire is unmistakable. Perfection is of the past tense.
Page 27: Go back and add up
Here and elsewhere Celan’s numbers and neologistic numeroids do
not necessarily refer to any public convention or private code out-
side the poem; for example, Twelve-Night is not Twelfth Night.
Number and numbered, in Celan, are elements of language; meas-
uring, counting, and numeration are poetic acts as dicey as shooting
craps. The orchid (in Greek, testicle) is also known in German as
“boy-weed”; in the context of Celan’s work as a whole, the orchid
participates in a poetic constellation (almond, root, bulb, stone,
cloud) that traces the tragic genealogy of the Jewish people. See es-
pecially the poem “Radix, Matrix.”
Page 28: Half-mauled, mask-
A corbel stone is a stone bracket or supporting architectural mem-
ber; literally “collar-stone” (which agrees with the other anatomical
references in the poem). The poem can be read as a Rilkean gaze
into the eye-of-the-beloved, which opens into the strangenesses of a
mortuary crypt, and/or as a Rilkean cathedral poem, that is, a re-
sponse that sees through Rilke’s Angel of the Meridian, turning it
inside out. Either way, the image exceeds the mind of the imaginer.
Finally, talking to stones (Celan’s own “Radix, Matrix” begins “as
one speaks to the stone”) and talking stones (epitaphs) are equally
at the origin of poetry—an origin Celan subjects to relentless histor-
ical, physiological, and linguistic analysis.
Page 29: From fists white with the truth
Celan’s pounded word-walls conflate public wailing-walls with
cephalostructures and language centers in the brain.
120
Page 30: Noisemakers shoot into the light: it’s the Truth
The noise maker (Schwirrholz) that broaches this poem is an an-
cient device, used to invoke spirits’ voices; in English it’s sometimes
called “bullroarer,” but in English, noise-news (maker) affords an
irresistibly Celanian paronymy. (Its poetological significance was
noticed by Propertius: “Deficiunt magico torti sub carmine
rhombi.”)
The uncanny millennarian sheen in the middle stanza issues
from a neologism Celan coins out of the word “thousand” in Ger-
man—no doubt an echo of Hitler’s “tausendjähriges Reich”; how-
ever, in German “thousand” can be used to signify a vague but very
large numerical magnitude and hence as a curse word. The menace
of large numbers and the hints of ancient and contemporary tech-
nology in the poem gave rise to our “macro-mass.”
Page 31: You forget you forget
Turning, that is, re-troping, so-called termini technici into meta-
poetic figures is a move characteristic of Celan’s later manner. In
this case, earth science, human memory, and poetics are caught in
a vortex of metaphors: the poem’s point of departure is a literaliza-
tion (and thus a reversal) of a common process in the history and
uses of language: metaphor must “petrify”—be forgotten as meta-
phor—so it can serve as literal term. Conversely, in the end, all met-
aphor is consumed and the metaphor of metaphor (which cannot
be another metaphor or image) must vanish into the void (if you
will, the divine).
In the poem, a piece of once-articulated language (Ger. Spruch =
saying, dictum, maxim, motto, aphorism, quote from Scripture,
proverb, poem, etc.; cp. English- dict-) is defined as verkieselt: It has
become stone hard through absorption of silica—as in the case of
plants and animals buried by volcanic ash: Prevented from decay by
the ash, their material combines with silica picked up from the ash
by underground water; the result is a semiprecious gem. For Celan,
a “technical” description of this sort is nothing other than a descrip-
tion of memory and its response to catastrophic upheaval (with lan-
guage, the repository of memory).
As a piece of poiesis, this language “fossilized” (or silicified) into
“stone” (Stein) recalls—with polemic overtones—Heidegger’s medi-
tations on Being (Sein), Being’s forgottenness, and the forgetting of
Being’s forgottenness. The self-forgetful you, addressed in the poem,
should bring to mind Celan’s view of poetry as a forgetting of self.
Celan’s manuscripts show that the poem evolved around the
thought of a “sacrificial bush” (the burning bush, Moses, and the
121
stony tablets of the law). The bush in this case is “diminished” to

brush, Ger. Staude. (As in the first poem of the collection Zeitgehöft,
Celan may be thinking, among other things, of the Wanderstaude,
the tumbleweed or Russian(!) thistle, which breaks away from its
roots in fall and is driven by winds.) A burning bush that moves (a
footloose fireweed) is a daunting thought indeed.
The poem has been interpreted as memory’s passage through a
sacrificial fire that makes for deeper forgetting, until the pneuma
gathers the speaker in its void (Meinecke). In Celan, though, the
memory of burning and the burning of memory are always marked
by the irreducibly material historicity of the Holocaust.
Page 32: Crackpots, decomposing
An earlier version of the poem had “mirror” in line 2 which Celan
replaced with “depths,” perhaps to suggest a breakdown of the
mind-mirror analogy and a step beyond the philosophy of reflection
it informs. The ghostly-luminous repast of gray may be the reminis-
cence of a reminiscence of Celan’s earlier poem “Eine Hand.”
Page 33: Lichtenberg’s heir-
Woven into the poem are details from G. C. Lichtenberg’s life and
writings. On 10/4/1790, Lichtenberg wrote to his brother, asking
him to keep a special set of tablecloth and napkins in memory of his
mother and lost sisters. (The number “twelve” comes from Celan.)
In his “secret diary” Lichtenberg mentions a girl who appeared to
him as a “white comet,” distant, untouchable, and vows to guard the
memory of the spot where he observed her first at “meridianal
height.” “City ramparts” alludes to the topographies of Lichten-
berg’s memory (of Maria Dorothea Stechard selling flowers to pas-
sersby; she died at nineteen).
Research into Celan’s sources indicates that he gleaned much of
the material from the anthology German Men published (under a
pseudonym) by Walter Benjamin; Celan may have owned it in the
thirties, which (in view of Benjamin’s fate) would add a further
poignant twist to the poem’s acts of commemoration in the face of
loss, exile, and language breakdown.
The red “loss of / thought-thread” constitutes a memorable dis-
memberment of Goethe’s image (from Elective Affinities): The red
thread woven into royal navy cloth (so it can’t get lost or misappro-
priated) becomes, for Goethe, a symbol of the difference that makes
a whole cohere and endows it with identity.
Celan’s trope of the language towers that are to fall dead-silent
contains a translingual crux: In Celan’s Russian ear “silent” or
“mute” means “German”; for the Slavs, the Germans were the “mute
122
ones,” niemtzy; during the war and in its aftermath one could often
hear the awful paronymy, nazi-niemtzy. Celan’s cardinal problem as
a poet in German was precisely what he called the German
language’s “terrifying silence” during the “thousand darknesses of
murderous speech” (Bremen-Speech).
Visually (with its slender columnar shape), grammatically (its
stack of broken syntax), and thematically (its emphasis on memory,
inheritance, affiliation, and transmission), Celan’s poem becomes
the beacon it calls into being—a tower of language on the verge of si-
lence. We have deliberately foregrounded, in our translation (in
other words) the poem’s translatorial self-consciousness.
Page 35: The sight of the songbirds at dusk
The “bird” in line 1 is the European blackbird, Ger. Amsel, close
anagrammatic relative of one of Celan’s original names, Ants-
chel/Ancel. (Celan no doubt knew the bird’s Latin name, Mimus
polyglottos—he was a polyglot parrot himself; from the Latin it’s a
stone’s throw to the name of the American mockingbird.) Unlike the
New World blackbird, the European blackbird is a songster (just as
the mockingbird is). Our version frames the poem in lyric rather
than ornithological terms (from “songbirds” to “the singing in our
fingers”) in order to emphasize the poetological self-reflection but
also because the word “black” in the English would contribute a
poetically unignorable element that Celan’s German does not. The
reader sensitive to poetic resonance will notice a deliberate prolep-
tic thickening in our vocabulary choices (e.g., “sight,” “ring,” and
“ungraphed” anticipate “weapons” ); in the wake of “weapons,”
“sight” (in “the sight of weapons”) has already lost its scenic inno-
cence. Such thickenings of texture, whenever the target language
provides them, are indispensable if one is to do justice to the ex-
traordinarily resonant language of Celan’s oeuvre.
Page 37: frankfurt, september
“Frankfurt, September” is a study in modern art’s origins, means,
and ends: On the one side, we encounter the institutions and avatars
of culture, interpretation, and commerce (the title points to the
international book fair in Frankfurt); on the other, one artist’s un-
sayable pain and privacy.
Freud, who is explicitly named, opens the show as a graven image
on a screen and as an apparatus of enlightenment, metonymically
displaced by his Cockchafer Dream (a.k.a. the May-beetle dream,
analyzed in the chapter on condensation in The Interpretation of
Dreams). The image of the insect gives us the first hint of Kafka
(whose transformed Gregor Samsa is once referred to, erroneously,
123
as a species of beetle). But before we get to Kafka’s name, we hear

Kafka’s voice: “Psychology for the last time” quotes a note of
Kafka’s, first published with his “Wedding Preparations in the Coun-
try” (where, incidentally, a character envies the cockchafer’s condi-
tion of life). The quote, which serves as a transition from Freud to
Kafka, encapsulates Celan’s own attitude regarding psychology: He’s
on record saying psychology neither explains nor excuses anything.
Celan dubs his breakfast eater a Simili-Dohle. German Dohle
(jackdaw) translates Czech kavka, from which the name Kafka is de-
rived. Connoisseurs of literary ornitology may recall this diary entry
of Kafka’s: “In Hebrew my name is Amschel, like my mother’s ma-
ternal grandfather.” Celan’s name (before he anagrammatized it into
Celan) was Antschel. (He was matrilineally connected with the Jew-
ish community in Bohemia.) The bird in the poem is not the kavka
itself but a kavka translated into German (the language Kafka wrote
in) and a bestsellerized celebrity, to boot: in short, a displaced liter-
ary double or semblable—the situation Celan found himself in, too.
Insofar as translation is yet another act of doubling and pseudony-
myzation, we bared the device by doubling the double. But the fake
Kafka is not the end of Kafka. Celan ends his poem by reinscribing
the unignorable k’s of Kafka’s name and literary being into the
poem’s penultimate word, the Kehlkopfverschlusslaut, the glottal
stop said to be singing—an unheard melody, if ever there was one.
In phonetics, glottal stops (or occlusives) are cough-like sounds re-
constructed from Proto-Indo-European (the original sounds have
been lost). Kehlkopfverschlusslaut, the German term for “glottal
stop” (lit. occlusion of the head of the throat) is such a throatful that
it can choke even a native. Kafka’s last days were an agony of ema-
ciation and unsayable pain, his larynx closed by infection. Yet the
same closed larynx sang, with mortal humor, in his last masterpiece
“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.”
Page 38: Coincidence staged, the signs all
The curtailed U- at the poem’s very center recalls Celan’s statement,
in “The Meridian,” that the poem should conduct its topological
quest in the light of U-topia (hyphenation emphasizes the end’s no-
whereness). Celan’s emphasis on u-topia as an un-place should be
read against utopia in place (Nazi, Soviet, or any other). As for this
poem, its first four lines sketch a dys-topia in the light of which a
utopian place is no longer conceivable even in negative terms, so
that what remains is the sheer negativity of the U- (for the reader of
philosophical prefixes) or a sheer howl. Many late Celanian poems,
from Fadensonnen on, are devoted to satirical explorations of the
124
modern dys-topia (these poems were written at the height of the

German economic miracle). The apostrophized “Lion” may be Isaac
Luria (1534–72), a legendary figure in Jewish mysticism, called Ha-
Ari (Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac), The Lion, author of The Tree of Life
(recorded by his disciples).
Page 39: Who
The poem’s polemic with color and number, the perceivable and the
measurable, calls attention to its quarrel with the traditional means
of poetic expression, Celan’s own early poetic output included.
The black pennant in the penultimate stanza entropes the poet’s
sign as a celestial body: A circumpolar star “transiting” the meridian
above the pole is in “upper culmination”; the opposite or lowest
point is its “lower culmination”; when Venus and Mercury transit
across the Sun’s disk they appear as dark/black spots against the
sun’s face. The grotesque figure of the poet as juggler or minstrel ap-
pears in several of Celan’s poems, and so does the (anarchist) em-
blem of the black flag. German Gösch (small bow-flag) has an ety-
mological history a Celan wouldn’t miss: It comes from Geuse,
which at one time meant a rebel against Spanish rule (in the Neth-
erlands), but in the course of the sixteenth century came to mean
“beggar.” See also Celan’s poem “Shibboleth.”
The tunnel shield evoked at the end is a cast-iron cylinder used
in large-scale tunneling. Mining, drilling, tunneling—the slow, sub-
terranean groping in the dark toward the You or Thou (as opposed
to the unquestioned clarity of garish/false identity)—constitute
quintessential acts of negative capability (i.e., poetry) in Celan. (The
metapoetic significance of such metaphors goes back to the German
romantics, but Celan’s frequent use of unpoetic technical vocabu-
laries defamiliarizes the traditional topos.) Tunnel shield in German
is Grabschild; because the first meaning of Grab is “grave,” an inno-
cent eye would be tempted to read the word as if it meant a grave
plaque—which of course it does, in terms of its larger, poetic sense.
Page 40: Spasms, I love you, psalms
Spasms (Spasmen), psalms (Psalmen), and semen (Samen) consti-
tute an even closer triad in German than in English; the intimacy of
creation and procreation in the letter is the genetic mark of the
“Jewish strain” (Felstiner’s term). In the poem at hand, we have an
extreme example of blasphemous but nonetheless sacred revision-
ism in that the religious bond between psalmist and god is framed as
sexual intercourse. For Celan, this act of oral intercourse is nothing
other than a fundamental ars poetica—just as it was for David (the
exultant psalmist’s sexual member bears the mark of God). Celan
125
conjoins the second-person pronoun with the image of a narrow

chasm (Du-Schlucht: note the cavernous assonance) in a figure that
can be said to represent the ultimate Engführung or straining of lan-
guage—from speaker to collocutor, from human throat to divine
abyss. The pressure exerted upon language in this narrow and peri-
lous passage produces a poetics of paronymy, exemplified here in
what may be the quintessential paronymic pair, psalm–spasm. Every
item of the original poem has been subjected to this pressure, which
drives language beyond language.
It goes without saying that there are more ways than one (and
none) to render the vertiginous double chiasmus in the third stanza.
In the original Celan plays with the grammatical form “eternal” and
“uneternal” both as adjectives (positive and negative) and past par-
ticiples (from the verb “eternalize” or “eternitize”); in addition,
Celan’s play generates a host of satellite senses: Starting with 6
(eternal), we get verewigt, which means “eternitized” but also
“dead,” unewig (“uneternal”), and verunewigt. The last neologism
suggests “uneternitized” or, perhaps, de-eternitized. However, inso-
far as verewigt can mean “dead” and Verewigung “death,” the nega-
tive verunewigt also conjures up the opposite of “dead,”—a perfectly
inextricable tangle of life and death, time and timelessness.
“Red of reds” is a conjectural rendition of Celan’s “German” Ro-
trot, based on the form of the Hebrew superlative.
In a “psalm,” Celan’s geharft appears to be related to the psalm-
ist’s musical instrument (harp or lyre); hence “strummed” (from the
Greek psalein, to pluck/twang a stringed instrument). The homo-
nym of geharft, meaning screened (or sifted, strained), also makes
sense in this context in that it participates in a key Celanian chain of
metaphors derived from alchemy: gold–seed/semen–grain, etc.
Page 41: night in pau
Place Royale at Pau contains a famous tortoiseshell that served as
cradle for Henry IV; it’s inscribed with the dates of his birth and as-
sassination (he was leader of the Huguenots). Zeno of Elea was fa-
mous for his refutations of movement (the paradox of the arrow;
Achilles and the turtle), which mocked the detractors of his teacher
Parmenides. Written during Celan’s 1965 “flight” across France, the
poem also echoes Valéry’s “Graveyard by the Sea” translated by
Celan into German.
Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno,
Have you then pierced me with your feather arrow
That hums and flies, yet does not fly? The sounding
126
Shaft gives me life, the arrow kills. Oh, sun!—

Oh, what a tortoise-shadow to outrun
My soul, Achilles’ giant stride left standing.
(tr. C. Day Lewis)
Page 42: later in pau

Written in Pau in 1965 during Celan’s flight, the poem recalls
Celan’s 1964 trip to Amsterdam with his wife, whose name (Gis̀ele
de Lestrange) provides one clue to the apostrophized “stranger.”
(See also “Lyon, Les Archers.”) While in Amsterdam, Celan had
sought out Spinoza’s house only to find a vacant lot. Misunderstood
and accused of “abominable heresy” by orthodox Jews and Chris-
tians alike, Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish
community of Amsterdam and made a living as a lens crafter. The
name Pau, associated with the Albigensian heresy, triggers off the
the thought of Waterlooplein, associated with the Cathar heresy
(both were also known as the Bulgar heresy). Waterlooplein is the
famous flea market of Amsterdam, once called the Jewish Market.
Page 43: The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion
In German only one letter distinguishes delusion (Wahn) from the
true or real (wahr). The image of the scale occurs in several of
Celan’s later poems. In his discussion of the scale-topos in Jewish
mysticism, Gerschom Scholem mentions that it hangs from a place
which doesn’t exist and weighs those who do not exist.
Page 44: lyon, les archers
In manuscript the poem bears the inscription,
Lyon 27.10.1965, Cafe Les Archers
the young girl reading [Camus’] L’Etranger.
Celan was born on November 23, and often uses The Archer (Sagit-
tarius) as an emblem of his star-fated poetic intentions.
Page 46: Attached to out-cast
Morphemically, the German verb entäussern expresses a movement
of exteriorization, from inside to outside—which can be looked
upon as relinquishment or realization (as in some philosophical jar-
gons). Hence our attempt to slow down the perception of “out-cast”
by means of hyphenation. Aaron’s rod (Num. 17.8) budded,
bloomed, and yielded almonds. Has it been crossed here with a
crutch and/or with Mallarmé’s flower absent from all bouquets?
The poem’s (inverted) crown is, of course, its capitalized No, a
“no” that yields nothing to direct ontological questioning and yet
resonates with distant Celanian “determinations”; for example, his
127
poem “In Prague” speaks of pure “goldmaker’s-No”; in “Speak, you

also” the addressee is exhorted not to separate “no” from “yes.” In
these and other cases Celan demands that we reconsider—if not re-
constitute—the grounds of everything we take for granted, that is,
for given.
Page 50: Hothouse of an asylum
An earlier version of the last lines had “waving beards” instead of
manes of white horses; in one of his Hölderlin poems, “Tübingen,
Jänner,” Celan writes of the “shining beard of the patriarchs.” (Ger-
man Schimmel is etymologically related to “shine” and “shimmer.”)
The asylum in this poem may bear some relation to Hölderlin’s
years of incarceration.
Page 51: Lucky, the
Paulownia leaf: see note to “La Contrescarpe.”
Page 53: White noises, bundled
Poetry as a message in a bottle is an image Celan associated with
Mandelstam.
Page 55: Here are the industrious
Hinging solely on a here (Ger. hier has a French shadow, meaning
“yesterday”!) that holds language relics haunted by ghosts past and
present, the poem is characteristic of Celan’s late method in terms
of both composition (asyndetic serial notation) and tonality (appre-
hensive and satirical, allusive and elusive). It is a poem produced
by—and not meant to allay—anxiety. But this anxiety is not of the
poet’s own psychic state, as some have claimed; rather, it’s the anx-
iety of memory that revisits places of absence and death, and the
anxiety of language at the dreadful end of modernity.
From the very first lines, Celan as a facetious tour guide works
with pieces of unsettled and unsettling language. Thus, lines 1–2 in-
voke (the cliché of) German industriousness, which, given the
country’s limited mineral wealth, is a major source of wealth. And yet
this boldly trivial distich unmistakably imparts something unsaid
and terrible, if the reader chooses to dig under the surface of the in-
nocent word Boden = “ground,” “soil” (the compound Bodenschatz
= mineral wealth) only to discover to what disturbing uses the virtues
of the ground (“soil,” “Volk”) were put not too long ago; or remem-
bers how industry and industriousness—again, not too long ago—
were put in the service of extermination. Celan doesn’t give prescrip-
tions for reading, yet to follow the poem’s trails is, invariably, to run
into something disturbing or menacing. (For example, “syncope” and
Zyklon-B, the cyanide used in the gas chambers, share the same
vowels, filtered through very similar consonantal structures.)
128
The “jubilee year” according to Leviticus 25 would lead to “lib-

erty throughout all the land” as “ye shall return every man unto his
possession.” (An ironic comment on the German postwar miracle?
on God’s breach of promise?)
“Spider altars” (Spinnen-Altäre): In this conection, the manuscript
affords a glimpse into the workings of a poet’s mind. Originally, Celan
had written Sinnen-Altäre, then changed Sinnen (senses) to Spinnen
(spiders). Out of a letter’s difference, the poet spins a highly sugges-
tive metaphor much better attuned to the poem’s serial menace. In
fact, there is a superimposition of two metaphors: The senses spin
networks; behind closed doors, the spiders go about their business.
The arachnoid, incidentally, is a thin membrane of the brain; the
vocabulary of brain anatomy is prominent in the later Celan.
The poem’s tour ends in the narrowest place (another act of
Engführung!): Celan’s Stehzelle, cell or stall, may refer to the 3 by 3
arrest cages at Auschwitz, in which a prisoner had room only to
stand.
Page 56: When I don’t know, when I don’t know
The poem seems to have begun as a reminiscence of, or gloss on,
Hölderlin: At one point Celan considered Hölderlin’s “Und nie-
mand weiss” as a possible motto. The words mean “and no one
knows” (or, with a different syntax, “and no one can . . .”). In “Rous-
seau,” a poem concerned with orientation during a time of upheaval
and with seeing beyond one’s own time, Hölderlin remarks, “no one
can show you the allotted way [und niemand / Weiss . . . zu weisen];
in his “Bread and Wine,” no one can tell the whenceness and the
whatness of Night’s favor; “And no one knows” is also the first line
of his “Heimat” (Homeland); the last line of “Der Ister” is similar:
“Weiss niemand” (nobody knows).
The Aschrej prayer is a part of the Jewish service. It comes from the
last words of dying Moses, “O happy Israel! Who is like you, a people
delivered by the Lord.” (Deut. 33.29) Given a poet who thinks in sev-
eral languages at once, it is impossible not to remember that the He-
brew word Aschrej translates (but what can translation mean in this
case?!) the German Heil (which became the Nazi salute). With one
word Celan overturns what the German language knows as Heilsge-
schichte (the theological interpretation of history that emphasizes
God’s saving grace). As Jerry Glenn pointed out to us, Aschrej can be
read as Asch-Schrei (ash-cry or ash-shriek), ironically and literally,
depending on the poem’s split intra- and interlingual perspective.
The bizarre Hebraization of Pallas Athene performs a similarly
unsettling operation: It reminds us, on the one hand, of the Greek
129
utopia German culture dreamed of; on the other, of the unspeak-

able experiments that went on in the concentration camps. But in
addition to that—and more distressingly—it calls attention to the
unbearable German–Jewish tension that informs the poem itself,
and to the slippage of Celan’s pronominal and national identites (I,
you, he, she; Greek, Jewish, French).
Celan’s unignorably line-broken “im-mortal” at the end is more
than a mere negative acknowledging art’s mortality; as with Lucille,
in Danton’s Death, the mortal act of resistance to history—resistance
to the point of madness—becomes an act of art.
Page 61: Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids
This disturbing miniature is a rewriting of Celan’s early poem “From
darkness to darkness” (available in M. Hamburger’s selection).
Charon, the mythical ferryman of the underworld, has a “staring eye
of flame.” That Celan deliberately changed the gender of the ferry-
man should give pause to any one-sided identification of the femi-
nine Du figure in his poetry.
Page 62: Eyeshot’s island, broken
Here and elsewhere Celan’s idiosyncratic compounds (herzschrift-
gekrümelt, Zündschlüsselschimmer, etc.) pose an intractable problem.
In English compounds are a poeticism redolent of the 1890s. Even
in German where compounding is a common language pattern, and
where there is a tradition of Baroque compounding, Celan’s com-
pounds are exorbitant; one might even suspect his excesses of vin-
dictive intentions. His compounds often destroy reference as such
and focus on what makes it possible for language to exceed its in-
strumental and/or utilitarian uses. It is, of course, possible to follow
Celan to the letter and do excessive compounding in English (we
have G. M. Hopkins), but that leads nowhere because translation
changes the ground from and against which Celanian compounding
derives its power and inventiveness. Compounds thus leave a choice
between bad and worse solutions. Most translators (into English
and, especially, into French) choose to render Celan’s compounds as
genitives, such as (the) A of B. We, too, have had to resort to that so-
lution more often than we’d like.
The problem is threefold: To begin with, in English the com-
pound frequently levels out or parataxizes the relative grammatical
values of the two words conjoined, so it’s harder than in German in-
tuitively to hypotaxize components. Second, despite the flexibility
afforded by the genitive in English (conflating the subjective and
the objective genitive), the parts of a Celanian compound often do
not relate the way tenor and vehicle are supposed to in a genitival
130
metaphor. To turn a compound into a genitive entails a whole meta-

physics (of unambiguous causation, part/whole disposition, etc.);
yet many Celanian compounds seem designed precisely to obstruct
facile reference and to unsettle any realist metaphysics. Finally, in
the morphology of Celan’s poetic manner there is a clear movement
away from analytical genitival metaphors (of the type the-A-of-B),
which are quite frequent in his early work, and toward (synthetic)
compounds (preponderant in the later work). A regular recourse to
analytical genitives would thus distort something very important—
fundamental—in his development as a poet.
Page 63: Eternity gets older: at
Cerveteri, Italy, is an Etruscan archaeological site, and Celan’s
poetry constantly revisits sites that bear traces of entire disappeared
peoples.
Page 65: Come, we are cutting out
Rhomboid fossa is the diamond-shaped floor of the fourth ventricle
of the brain—which contains the center of breathing. Its interior
part, shaped like a pen nib, is called the calamus scriptorius. The
poem pushes as far as possible toward what might be called poetry’s
neuro-physiological origins. In a characteristic Celanian conflation
of inside and outside moves, the poem is framed as a jaunty excur-
sion to the pond (which is at the same time a kind of surgical ma-
neuver to cut to the quick, in the brain). The whole thing can be
read as a dark comedy: The human mind (craving not only outside
but inside information) remains obscure to itself, has fibers for fin-
gers, and cannot deeply enough name what it turns up from its own
depths, cannot recognize its own cognizances.
Page 67: Soul-blind behind the ashes
Soul-blind (Ger. Seelenblind) is the condition of visual agnosia (or
amnesia), the loss or diminution of the ability to interpret sensory
stimuli and thus recognize familiar objects (often as result of brain
damage). Reading Adolf Faller’s book on the human body from
which some of the medical terminology in this and other poems is
drawn, Celan underlined the passage that states that the most im-
portant mental functions such as consciousness, intelligence, will,
and memory depend on the intact structure of the pallium or the
mantle of gray matter forming the cerebral cortex. “Visual purple”
(rhodopsin) is the red photosensitive pigment in retinal rods of
fishes and higher vertebrates, which enables them to see in dim
light. It is decomposed by bright light, and must be composed anew
to see in dark. With the evocation of the “sacro-senseless word” (a
reminiscence of Mandelstam’s poem “In St. Petersburg,” which
131
Celan translated into German), the poet proposes a sort of neuro-

physiological poetics. The “network of vowels” (“pure” voices)
seems to conflate, in a complex synesthetic–physiological figure, the
inarticulate or, rather, prearticulated voice in the ear’s meatus and
the image of the eye’s retina (etym. “net”). “Networked vowels” sug-
gests—perhaps undecidably—either the latticework of a pure lan-
guage (we might also recall the absent vowels in Hebrew writing) or
language already caught in the eye’s net, that is, preformed. The fig-
ure of the poet, whose wounded eye/ear can see/hear (in the) voice-
inhabited “word-night,” is framed by the effort to articulate an ars
poetica after the disaster, after everything has been reduced to ashes.
The condition of possibility for such a poetics would seem to be a
radical inside-out inversion: The footwork is poetological, through a
dark (his own?) brain-interior, a space of neuro-physiology, yet al-
ready languaged.
Page 70: Out of angel flesh, on
The imagery of this poem is inspired, in part, by Gerschom
Scholem’s studies in the Kabbalah; see his discussion of the Shek-
hinah, the phallic tree of the ten Sefirot (numbers or perfections
which emanate from God; also, names by which the angels are
called), and the hierogamous union of man and woman as an act of
ascension that reestablishes primordial oneness. The sister-spouse
invoked here recalls figures in the Song of Songs. See also Isaiah
43.5.
Page 72: Walls of speech, space inwards
Celan’s neologism Redewände recalls the expression “Wenn die
Wände reden könnten,” if walls could speak.
Page 73: Four ells of earth
The original poem is structured by a quintuple anaphora: past par-
ticiples with the prefix ver-. It is also informed by a daring chiasmus
that breaks up and then realigns the elements of the catastrophic
events in the first and last stanza: Instead of a stone trough (used in
bread kneading) and a lightning flash, Celan has a storm trough and
a stone flash. The trough or cradle of creation (where “No one
kneads us” in Celan’s earlier poem “Psalm”) thus becomes a figure
of universal depression and disaster. Verbal prefixation in English
being a much more limited affair than in German, this translation
sought to convert the vertical effects (the anaphoric lightning that
sparks the poem) into horizontal ones.
In a reading based on Celan’s source (Scholem’s reconstruction
of Kabbalistic creation myths), Pöggeler converts the poem’s series
of disasters into a final positive useful result (the sun’s essence,
132
preserved and purified by the process of fermentation, testifies to

the power of tradition to renew itself). But the brain war in heaven
responsible for Celan’s foul weather won’t be stopped by dialectical
tricks. Most readers of the original will assume that the figure
evoked in the last line, Hebe, is the goddess of youth; this makes
sense both rhetorically (the evocation of yet a third figure of myth)
and psychologically (Celan’s wasted youth or any wasted youth, all
the way back to that of God’s first orphan, Adam). It appears, how-
ever, that Celan used Scholem’s words verbatim and Hebe refers to
the portion of dough that is the priest’s share (“Just as according to
the Torah a portion of dough [eine Teighebe] is removed from the
rest to serve as the priest’s share, so is Adam the best share [die
Hebe] that is taken from the dough of the earth” (“The Idea of the
Golem,” tr. R. Manheim); Scholem further evokes the legend that
God gave Earth a receipt for the “four ells of earth” he borrowed for
one thousand years, a receipt kept in the heavenly archives. (Gabriel
and Michael witnessed the transaction.) In this scriptural context,
Celan’s unusual word choice Hebe is more than a mere quote from
Scholem. It was Luther who first used Hebe in the sense of “offer-
ing” (as in Levit. 22.12 “the offering of holy things”) to designate
something not available in the German language. In this sense,
Celan’s Hebe is a transitional aporia: it designates something be-
yond German, beyond the ashes.
Page 76: As loud colors, heaped up
Ancient belief, mentioned by Scholem, has it that God’s eyes have
no eyelids: Israel’s protector never sleeps. Celan’s documented
awareness of Scholem’s words gives the poem a bitter ironic turn.
Page 79: haut mal
“Haut mal” is the old French designation of epilepsy. (English vo-
cabulary distinguishes between “grand mal” and “petit mal” at-
tacks.) Celan exploits the correlation between this “high” or “divine”
malady and the ancient notion of poetic inspiration, and B. Badiou
has traced the poem’s origin to Celan’s reading of Hippocrates:
I do not believe that the “Sacred Disease” is any more divine or sa-
cred than any other disease [. . .] nevertheless, it has been regarded as
a divine visitation by those who, being only human, view it with ig-
norance and astonishment [. . .]. It is my opinion that those who first
called this disease “sacred” were the sort of people we now call witch-
doctors, faith-healers, quacks and charlatans. These are exactly the
people who pretend to be very pious and to be particularly wise. By
invoking a divine element they were able to screen their own failure
133
to give suitable treatment and so called this a “sacred” malady to

conceal their ignorance of its nature. [They picked] their phrases
carefully, prescribing purifications and incantations along with absti-
nence from baths [. . .] their patients were forbidden to wear black
because it is a sign of death, to use goat skin blankets or to wear goat
skins, nor were they allowed to put one foot on the other or one hand
on the other [. . .] none of the inhabitants of the interior of Lybia can
possibly be healthy seeing that they sleep on goat skins and eat goat
meat [. . .] I believe that human bodies cannot be polluted by a god;
the basest object by the most pure [. . .]. Like other diseases it’s he-
reditary. (Hippocratic Writings, W. N. Mann tr., pp. 237–240)
From its very title, the poem behaves as a polylogue: Haut and
Mal are common German words (meaning “skin” and “mark,” re-
spectively) and, even though their juxtaposition results in a some-
what strained German, the poem that follows this title is in German;
the combination of Haut and Mal would recall other formations,
such as Denkmal (monument) and Muttermal (birthmark). So there
is almost as much incentive to construe the title in German as in
French. The head graphemes seem poised in nearly perfect unde-
cidability. (Consider further the ironic allusion to Ps. 119, “Blessed
are the undefiled.”)
The figure addressed in the poem—indeed, the figure of the
poem (subjective and objective genitive)—is gendered feminine in
the original. (Gender is ineliminable in the German nominal
system.) The reader is invited to decode this Sleeping Beauty’s
identity at his or her own discretion; we tend to see the figure not
as something out there the poem’s language refers to, but rather as
something that arises out of language and subsumes Celan’s
poetry as a whole. For example, the literal “your tongue is sooty”
invites a bilingual reading because German russig (ashen; sooty)
is, paronymically, extremely close to russisch (Russian), and it was
Celan himself who jocoseriously claimed he was a Russian poet
exiled among German infidels. “Bilious” in German is designated
with the word gallig, which suggests Celan’s language of domicile,
French.
If the poem’s head is divided between two languages, its last
word is inhabited by two graphemes: German Glied (member) con-
tains the grapheme Lied (song). In a poem that deserves to be
named Celan’s Song of Songs (formally, “Haut Mal” resembles the
wasf, the sequential imagistic description-praise of the beloved’s
body, as in Song of Solomon 4.1f and 6.14f), this paronymy could
134
hardly be overemphasized. Celan once mentioned that his language

was designed and assigned to perform a “spectral analysis of
things,” to show how they are penetrated by, or fused with, other
things. The poet’s things, we needn’t emphasize, are her words; his
words, her things.
Page 80: The golfball growth
Pöggeler relates the poem to Leibniz (who suffered from a calcifica-
tion or growth in the neck and, as a Baroque-age man, wore a full-
head hairpiece): Leibniz brought to an end classical metaphysics
and inaugurated the calculative technical-scientific thinking of the
modern world. The latter, the poem would seem to remind us, can-
not reckon (with) death any more than phenomenology can see the
back of its head.
Page 81: Windfield bound for winter: this
The manuscript contains a note in French: “La où il n’y a pas
d’hommes, efforce-toi d’être un homme.”
Page 83: Audio-visual vestiges in
While this poem no doubt owes something to Celan’s experience
with mental institutions during the sixties, its vocabulary has a
much wider resonance. Celan left Eastern Europe precisely at the
time when all educators had to pass through the camps for Marxist–
Leninist education, a policy revived during the Cultural Revolution
in China. Beyond this historical resonance, the poem’s position at
the head of his collection Lichtzwang suggests a philosophical pro-
gram on the poet’s part, which subsumes the twin coercions of polit-
ical and psychiatric orthodoxy under the generalized coercive power
of a light source or force. The latter tolerates only third-person pub-
lic functionality, and so subjects the intimate but shifty you and its
linguistic correlate, poetic speech, to forms of institutional control.
We opted for the objective form of the third-person pronoun partly
for vernacular naturalness in English and partly to emphasize the
third-person’s subject–object split.
Page 84: Knock out
Words set afloat recur in Celan’s poetry as images of his venture into
unmapped realms. The first keeper-in-place of poetic language, ac-
cording to this gnomic poem, is nothing other than light: it is light
that drives the wedges which demarcate, differentiate, individuate;
thus it is light that confines what it defines and relegates poetic say-
ing to the fixed nomenclatures of history.
Page 85: Eternities swept
The evocation of stone and orphans in the third stanza suggests a
disjointed pun with far-reaching philosophical implications: German
135
Waise, orphan, is homophonic with Weise, wise man; Stein der Wei-
sen is German for the philosopher’s stone.
Page 87: Degenerate / Verworfene (2, 290)
Celan’s very early sheaf of adages Gegenlicht (contre-jour, back-
light) shows that his postwar poetic career began with an explora-
tion of contrariety and inversion that led him farther and farther
into negativity without return: neither a simple inversion into the
opposite, nor a dialectical negation of negation. The end of this
poem (a figure of disfigurement? a reminder that poetry produces
figures that can’t be placed? that out of Auschwitz nothing can be
born but abortions?) precludes any final interpretive move.
Klose has established that the goddess in question was probably
“inspired” by Fabre’s account of the praying mantis; as a “signature
of sexuality” (the praying mantis preys, according to the myth, on its
male partner) the figure occurs in several of Celan’s late poems.
Page 88: Assembly-
It is no accident, perhaps, that Celan’s order of poems pairs a failed
creation (“Degenerate”) with a satire of creation mechanics (in this
poem, images of soul-healing are crossed with those of mantid-
hatching). Moving from techne’s products toward technology’s es-
sence, and from visible forms to the fabrication of forms of visibility,
the poem recalls Celan’s suspiciousness of art’s points and appoint-
ments (voiced in “The Meridian” and elsewhere.)
Page 89: Weather hand
Celan’s poetry of nature (to use a misnomer) is poised on the bor-
ders of the humanized and humanizable world (glaciers and ice-
fields, tundras and bogs, deserts and mudflats), just as his poetry of
language is poised on the borders of signification. In this case, sig-
nification is literally bogged down by polysemy and paronymy: Ger-
man Lache, puddle or pool, means also “mark(er)” or “tapping” (se-
creting resin); in this paludial land/skull-scape Lache won’t fail to
conjure up Leiche, corpse. Celan’s interest in bogs—one he shares
with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney—is related in part to the capac-
ity of bogs as uncanny natural memory, preserving bodies undecom-
posed. Our version highlights Celan’s interest in sound intricacies,
punning and paronymy (e.g. puddle-paludal-pedal). “Weather
hand” recalls the English “weather eye.”
Page 91: We always find ourselves
The initial poem in Celan’s collection Schneepart, “We always find
ourselves” is a poetic colon of sorts, a gathering up of motifs and
near self-citations from earlier poems (in particular, this poem can
be read as a rewriting of the initial poem in Die Niemandsrose: see
136
Hamburger’s translation of “There was earth in them”) and a

launching into new, ever colder—and stranger—latitudes.
Page 92: Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows
The occasion of this poem was a winter-night walk during Celan’s
first and last postwar visit to Berlin in 1967—an occasion super-
charged with personal and historical memory (hence the extreme
economy and compression of reference and allusion). The begin-
ning is innocently picturesque: Berlin’s “lilac twilight” is the city’s
artistic signature—a commonplace in post-symbolist art and poetry;
with the evocation of “yellow” blotches, however, the cityscape be-
gins to lose its innocence, especially in apposition to Jacob’s Staff
(the stars of Orion that dominate the winter sky). The constellation
shines over the rubble of what until the war was Berlin’s Anhalter
Terminus, one of the architectural glories of an imperial city. In the
backlight of the stars, the picturesque yellows recall, inevitably, the
yellow Jewish stars now vanished from Berlin. It’s no accident that
Celan led his friends (and the reader) to that place: It’s the place of
his first arrival in Berlin, at the time of Kristallnacht (see “La Con-
trescarpe”). The station’s “rubble” in this case is designated with a
non-Berliner word, betraying a viewpoint that is both foreign (Aus-
trian) and pejorative. (The word used to mean “fragment”or
“lump,” until an eighteenth-century translator of Milton used it in
the plural to coin a neologism that now means “ruins.”) The next
stanza, however, takes us back to Berlin, linguistically, with the
street-talkish Kokelstunde, the hour of matchsticks or of “playing
with fire.” The image thus compresses a sarcastic evocation of small-
street sentimentality and big-time arson (from Kristallnacht to
World War II). Thereupon Celan again changes the linguistic key,
using a Latin-based neologism with an all-European resonance,
Interkurrierendes: This momentary (?) absence of an “intercurrent”
event can be read—notice Celan’s signature, the menacing ambigu-
ity—as one turning the picturesque cityscape into a veil of history
(no one to start a fire this time, yet the ruins remain). At the end, the
topos of snow (silence, oblivion, etc.) casts its pall on the scene,
while a pun hinged on a single sound (Steh- vs. Schnee-) shifts the
perspective from the neighborhood tavern to the chambers of
snow—the last end of those who gathered at taverns to boost their
spirits before Kristallnacht.
Page 93: You with the dark slingshot
A Goliath’s apostrophe to David’s God.
Page 96: The aural apparatus drives a flower
An ironic allusion to Rilke’s first sonnet to Orpheus? We didn’t
137
mean to force a green fuse on the line—nor do we refuse a good

allusion’s force.
Page 97: Open glottis, air flow
(Human) vowels always have more than one formant (G.-M. Schulz).
Traditional philosophy, based on the the metaphysics of voice, re-
gards vowels as the medium of spirit; consonants, as the obstruction
of matter. With its hint of deficiency in vowel quality and spirit, this
poem would seem to suggest a mode of “articulation” on the bor-
derline between animal voice and machine noise. (The vowels of
God’s name are not to be spoken.)
Page 98: Raised bog, in the shape of
The English nomenclature of bogs distinguishes between “raised
bogs” and “blanket bogs.” The former are sometimes described as
“domed” since the turf grows above the water level; in German, the
same visual logic results in the name Hochmoor (“highmoor”)
which is said to have a watch-crystal shape. Celan, characteristically,
literalizes the standard German descriptive metaphor and moves
from the timepiece’s outside (the crystal) to the very mechanism of
time indication and thus from human (clockwork) time to geological
time. As a result, it becomes impossible to tell temporal (or the met-
aphorical) from spatial (the literal) landscape, indication from fig-
uration, justice from ingestion.
Sundews are carnivorous bog-dwelling plants, secreting from
their leaves a dew-like viscid substance, digesting the trapped in-
sects, and expelling the skeletal remains. As the swallowtail (butter-
fly) is called Ritter (knight) in German, the line reads like an ento-
mological version of La Belle Dame sans Merci. In the original, the
candle-like mullein flowers are called Sabbath candles, which, in
turn, are associated with the arrival of the zaddik and with a break-
away from clockwork temporality.
Page 99: Particles, patriarchs, buried
The glitter of buried ore (precious metal) and the panonymic nuggets
(Erzflitter–Erzväter; Kalkspur–Karstwannen–Kargheit–Klarheit) are
conjoined, geo-poetologically. Angiosperms are vascular plants
(roses, orchids); they have their seeds in a closed ovary. The end of
the poem uses the karst formations in Romania as figures of poetic
self-reflection.
Page 100: And force and pain
The end of the poem recalls the Yiddish song (used by Celan as an
epigraph for “Benedicta”) in which a man goes to heaven to ask
God if things ought to be the way they are.
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one line short

Page 101: A reading branch, just one

One of the longest and most difficult among Celan’s later poems, “A
reading branch” anatomizes the process of reading and the emer-
gence of poetry as a counterstatement to contemporary news re-
ports. Starting with what seems to be a medical probe or brain scan,
and alluding to the physiology of visual perception, the poem
probes the parallel universes of outer space and inner brain, con-
frontation and solidarity. Its bifurcated structure (two symmetrical
parts, each 17 lines long) mimics the structure of the optical chi-
asma, the branching and crossing of the optical nerves. After a series
of polarities (left and right eye, right and left hemisphere of the
brain, space probe and bloodclot, land and sea, terrestrial (human)
and lunar (inhuman) landscapes, lit and dark side of the moon), the
name of Pilsen (line 24) signals a switch to the political polarity of
East and West in the late 1960s and the Warsaw Pact invasion of
Czechoslovakia (the “landlocked” country alluded to in line 16). In
manuscript, the poem is dated August 21/22, 1968, precisely the
night after the invasion. Its immediate occasion thus seems to be the
coincidence of private and public forms of incursion, excursion, and
the crossing, in the reader’s mind, of two textual universes: news re-
ports of the progress of the U.S. Apollo Program (Celan was keenly
interested in the opening up of new realms and the historical and
human consequences of conquest, see “The Syllable Pain”) and
news reports of the Soviet-led invasion of its unruly satellite nation.
(In a poem written on the day of the invasion, Celan recapitulated
the event with two letters: ZK. In East-German German, the initials
ZK stood for Zentralkomitee; their mirror image, KZ, stands for
Konzentrazionslager.)
Our version follows readings by Speier and Zschachlitz, but
many elements of the original remain conjectural.
Page 103: The cables have already been laid
In its deliberately mixed diction (militarese, legalese, health-and-
fitness-ese), this poem seems remarkably prescient of the pathology
of promissory discourses in commerce, in our time.
Page 105: Nowhere, with its silken veil
The poem revisits the connection between nowhere and daylight
(associated with boundaries, separation, loss), superimposing sev-
eral frames of metaphor—inside a medical insititution, inside the
apparatuses of time and language, inside (and outside) being. Hence
the hint of transcendental tele-phony, between the ontologically
separate self and other. Poetry promises the giving of being to (and
139
one line short

through) the other, but ordinary language (in this instance its pro-
nominal system) resists the rearticulation of that relationship; hence
the strangeness of the last lines. (This strangeness has inspired the
notion that the poem reads in German as if it were (already) a trans-
lation from the Hebrew, not only in terms of echoes and allusions
but in terms of its very grammar (Stadler). Such an exposure of the
lyric genre to several thousand years of translatorial history across
several languages (sacred and profane) proposes unfathomable
depths. Cf. Felstiner’s “Translating Paul Celan’s ‘Du sei wie du.’ ”)
Page 106: In the most remote of
Starting with the “stairway of amens,” several details in the poem al-
lude to Jacob’s dream of the ladder in Genesis 28 and beyond it to
the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem (as the end of the pilgrimage).
With its displacement of paralysis, from human body to sacred
ground, the poem questions the ability of secular humanity (Dasein)
to overcome its crisis of faith and climb into the holy; it also calls
into question its own language: The scale of paralyzed affirmations
is preceded by a scale of meaning, with Dasein being at the farthest
remove from meaning. The word “Supernothing” was coined by the
sixteenth-century mystic Angelus Silesius. Celan’s studies in nega-
tive theology have left many traces in his poetry.
Page 107: O little root of a dream
Metaphors of digging, mining, excavating, rooting, etc. are common
in Celan’s poetry and invariably have a self-reflexive linguistic di-
mension. In German, the earth-language connection rests on a pow-
erful anagram: Rede (speech)–Erde (earth). Mud was always in the
mouth.
In German, vom Blatt singen/lesen (lit. read from the sheet)
means “to sight-read.” Celan inverts the expression by adding
“blind” to the sheet/leaf (Blindblatt). Interestingly, the sheet/leaf
remains invisible (or blind) in the meaning of the idiom. The ambi-
guity of “you read me blind” is an attempt to suggest the self-
effacing quality of the original language.
Page 108: Don’t sign your name
This poem was published posthumously in Paul Celan, Eingedunkelt
und Gedichte aus dem Umkreis von Eingedunkelt, Hrsg. von Bertrand
Badiou und Jean-Claude Rambach. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1991.
140
index of
english titles/first lines and
german titles/half titles
Numbers in parentheses refer to volume and page number in Paul Celan,

Gesammelte Werke, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983.
A reading branch, just one / Ein Leseast (2, 403) 101

Als Farben (2, 215) / As loud colors, heaped up 76
And force and pain / Und Kraft und Schmerz (2, 398) 100
Angewintertes Windfeld (2, 222) / Windfield bound for winter: this 81
Anrainerin Nacht (2, 184) / Next-door-neighbor Night 68
As loud colors, heaped up / Als Farben (2, 215) 76
Assembly- / Fertigungs-/Halle (2, 291) 88
At high noon, in / Mittags (2, 48) 25
Attached to out-cast / Die Wahrheit (2, 140) 46
Audio-visual vestiges in / Hörreste, Sehreste (2, 233) 83
Auf überregneter Fährte (2, 145) / On the rainsoaked rutted
road, silence 52
Aus den nahen (2, 139) / Graygreens 47
Aus Engelsmaterie (2, 196) / Out of angel flesh, on 70
Aus Fäusten (2, 66) / From fists white with the truth 29
Ausgeschlüpfte (2, 140) / Chitin sunlings 48
Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep / Hinterm kohlegezinkten (2, 62) 26
Bei Wein und Verlorenheit (1, 213) / With wine and being lost, with 5
Beider (2, 213) / Naked under death leaves 74
Chitin sunlings / Ausgeschlüpfte (2, 140) 48
Coincidence staged, the signs all / Gezinkt der Zufall (2, 115) 38
Come, we are cutting out / Komm (2, 181) 65
Crackpots, decomposing / Irrennäpfe (2, 90) 32
Das ausgeschachtete Herz (2, 150) / Your heart manholed 54
Das gedunkelte (2, 414) / The splintering echo, darkened 104
Das Im-Ohrgerät (2, 383) / The aural apparatus drives a flower 96
Das seidenverhangene Nirgend (3, 74) / Nowhere, with its silken veil 104
Das Stundenglas (2, 50) / The hourglass buried 25
Das taubeneigrosse Gewächs (2, 221) / The golfball growth 80
Day freed from demons / Entteufelter Nu (2, 163) 58
Degenerate / Verworfene (2, 290) 87
Deinem, auch deinem (2, 370) / I gave a chance 94
Den verkieselten Spruch (2, 79) / You forget you forget 31

Der geglückte (2, 144) / Lucky, the 51
Der puppige Steinbrech (2, 142) / Hothouse of an asylum 50
Die abgewrackten Tabus (2, 168) / Wet from the world 60
Die Ewigkeit (2, 177) / Eternity gets older: at 63
Die Ewigkeiten (2, 283) / Eternities swept 85
Die fleissigen (2, 151) / Here are the industrious 55
Die herzschriftgekrümelte (2, 174) / Eyeshot’s island, broken 62
Die Irin (2, 288) / She of the freckled farewells 86
Die Rauchschwalbe (2, 216) / The chimney-swallow, sister 77
Die Schwermutsschnellen hindurch (2, 16) / Floated down
blackwater rapids 17
Die Silbe Schmerz (1, 280) / pain, the syllable 13
Die Stricke (2, 190) / The ropes, stiff with salt water 69
Die Unze Wahrheit (2, 128) / The ounce of truth in the depths
of delusion 43
Die Wahrheit (2, 140) / Attached to out-cast 46
Don’t sign your name / Schreib dich nicht 108
Du mit der Finsterzwille (2, 350) / You with the dark slingshot 93
Ein Leseast (2, 403) / A reading branch, just one 101
Ein Wurfholz (1, 258) / Flung wood 11
Einem, der vor der Tür stand (1, 242) / To one who stood outside
the door, one 9
Einiges Handähnliche (1, 236) / Hand- 8
Engholztag (2, 46) / Ring narrowing Day under 23
Entschlackt (2, 182) / Free of dross, free of dross 66
Entteufelter Nu (2, 163) / Day freed from demons 58
Erblinde (2, 45) / Go blind at once, today 22
erratic / Erratisch (1, 235) 7
Erratisch (1, 235) / erratic 7
Erzflitter (2, 391) / Particles, patriarchs, buried 99
Es sind schon (2, 407) / The cables have already been laid 103
Eternities dead / Ewigkeiten (2, 141) 49
Eternities swept / Die Ewigkeiten (2, 283) 85
Eternity gets older: at / Die Ewigkeit (2, 177) 63
Ewigkeiten (2, 141) / Eternities dead 49
Eyeshot’s island, broken / Die herzschriftgekrümelte (2, 174) 62
Fertigungs-Halle (2, 291) / Assembly- 88
Floated down blackwater rapids / Die Schwermutsschnellen
hindurch (2, 16) 17
Flooding, big- / Flutender (2, 37) 21
Flung wood / Ein Wurfholz (1, 258) 11
142
Flutender (2, 37) / Flooding, big- 21

Fortgewälzter (2, 214) / Stone of incest, rolled away 75
Four ells of earth / Verwaist (2, 212) 73
frankfurt, september / Frankfurt, September (2, 114) 37
Frankfurt, September (2, 114) / frankfurt, september 36
Free of dross, free of dross / Entschlackt (2, 182) 66
From fists white with the truth / Aus Fäusten (2, 66) 29
Gezinkt der Zufall (2, 115) / Coincidence staged, the signs all 38
Gigantic / Riesiges (2, 157) 57
Go back and add up / Von der Orchis (2, 64) 27
Go blind at once, today / Erblinde (2, 45) 22
Gray-white of sheer / Weissgrau (2, 19) 18
Graygreens / Aus den nahen (2, 139) 47
Gurgling, then / Schlickende (2, 99) 35
Halbzerfressener (2, 65) / Half-mauled, mask- 28
Half-mauled, mask- / Halbzerfressener (2, 65) 28
Hand- / Einiges Handähnliche (1, 236) 8
haut mal / Haut Mal (2, 220) 79
Haut Mal (2, 220) / haut mal 79
Here are the industrious / Die fleissigen (2, 151) 55
Hinterm kohlegezinkten (2, 62) / Behind the charcoal surfaces
of sleep 26
Hochmoor (2, 390) / Raised bog, the shape of 98
Hörreste, Sehreste (2, 233) / Audio-visual vestiges in 83
Hothouse of an asylum / Der puppige Steinbrech (2, 142) 50
How low could it go, my once immortal word / Wohin mir
das Wort (1, 273) 12
Hüllen (2, 164) / Husks of the finite, stretchable 59
Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids / Stille (2, 172) 61
Husks of the finite, stretchable / Hüllen (2, 164) 59
I gave a chance / Deinem, auch deinem (2, 370) 94
(I know you: you’re the one who’s bent so low / Ich kenne
dich (2, 30) 19
Ich kenne dich (2, 30) / (I know you: you’re the one who’s bent
so low 19
In der fernsten (3, 77) / In the most remote of 105
In the most remote of / In der fernsten (3, 77) 106
Irrennäpfe (2, 90) / Crackpots, decomposing 32
It’s late. A fat fetish / Spät (2, 178) 64
Kleide die Worthöhlen aus (2, 198) / Upholster the word-hollows 71
Kleines Wurzelgeträum (3, 92) / O little root of a dream 107
Klopf (2, 268) / Knock out 84
143
Knock out / Klopf (2, 268) 84

Komm (2, 181) / Come, we are cutting out 65
la contrescarpe / La Contrescarpe (1, 282) 15
La Contrescarpe (1, 282) / la contrescarpe 15
later in pau / Pau, Später (2, 126) 42
Lichtenberg’s heir- / Lichtenbergs zwölf (2, 91) 33
Lichtenbergs zwölf (2, 91) / Lichtenberg’s heir- 33
Lila Luft (2, 335) / Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows 92
Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows / Lila Luft (2, 335) 92
Lucky, the / Der geglückte (2, 144) 51
lyon, les archers / Lyon, Les Archers (2, 130) 44
Lyon, Les Archers (2, 130) / lyon, les archers 44
Mauerspruch (2, 371) / proverb on the wall 95
Mittags (2, 48) / At high noon, in 25
Naked under death leaves / Beider (2, 213) 74
Next-door-neighbor Night / Anrainerin Nacht (2, 184) 68
night in pau / Pau, Nachts (2, 125) 41
Nightsources, distant / Quellpunkte (2, 325) 90
Noisemakers shoot into the Light: it’s the Truth /
Schirrhölzer (2, 67) 30
Nowhere, with its silken veil / Das seidenverhangene
Nirgend (3, 74) 105
O little root of a dream / Kleines Wurzelgeträum (3, 92) 107
Offene Glottis (2, 388) / Open glottis, air flow 97
On the rainsoaked rutted road, silence / Auf überregneter
Fährte (2, 145) 52
Open glottis, air flow / Offene Glottis (2, 388) 97
Out of angel flesh, on / Aus Engelsmaterie (2, 196) 70
pain, the syllable / Die Silbe Schmerz (1, 280) 13
Particles, patriarchs, buried / Erzflitter (2, 391) 99
Pau, Nachts (2, 125) / night in pau 41
Pau, Später (2, 126) / later in pau 42
proverb on the wall / Mauerspruch (2, 371) 95
Quellpunkte (2, 325) / Nightsources, distant 90
Raised bog, the shape of / Hochmoor (2, 390) 98
Redewände (2, 211) / Walls of speech, space inwards 72
Riesiges (2, 157) / Gigantic 57
Ring narrowing Day under / Engholztag (2, 46) 23
Schirrhölzer (2, 67) / Noisemakers shoot into the Light: it’s the Truth 30
Schlafbrocken (2, 137) / Sleep-pieces, wedges 45
Schlickende (2, 99) / Gurgling, then 35
Schreib dich nicht / Don’t sign your name 108
144
Seelenblind (2, 183) / Soul-blind behind the ashes 67

Selbdritt, Selbviert (1, 216) / threesome, foursome 6
She of the freckled farewells / Die Irin (2, 288) 86
Singable remainder—trace / Singbarer Rest (2, 36) 20
Singbarer Rest (2, 36) / Singable remainder—trace 20
Sleep-pieces, wedges / Schlafbrocken (2, 137) 45
Sommerbericht (1, 192) / summer report 4
Soul-blind behind the ashes / Seelenblind (2, 183) 67
Spasmen (2, 122) / Spasms, I love you, psalms 40
Spasms, I love you, psalms / Spasmen (2, 122) 40
Spät (2, 178) / It’s late. A fat fetish 64
Stille (2, 172) / Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids 61
Stimmen (1, 147) / Voices, scored into 1
Stone of incest, rolled away / Fortgewälzter (2, 214) 75
summer report / Sommerbericht (1, 192) 4
The aural apparatus drives a flower / Das Im-Ohrgerät (2, 383) 96
The cables have already been laid / Es sind schon (2, 407) 103
The chimney-swallow, sister / Die Rauchschwalbe (2, 216) 77
The golfball growth / Das taubeneigrosse Gewächs (2, 221) 80
The hourglass buried / Das Stundenglas (2, 50) 25
The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion / Die Unze
Wahrheit (2, 128) 43
The ropes, stiff with salt water / Die Stricke (2, 190) 69
The sight of the songbirds at dusk / Vom Anblick der Amseln (2, 94) 35
The splintering echo, darkened / Das gedunkelte (2, 414) 104
threesome, foursome / Selbdritt, Selbviert (1, 216) 6
To one who stood outside the door, one / Einem, der vor der
Tür stand (1, 242) 9
Und Kraft und Schmerz (2, 398) / And force and pain 100
Ungewaschen, unbemalt (2, 333) / We always find ourselves 91
Unwashed, unpainted / Ungewaschen, unbemalt (2, 333) 91
Upholster the word-hollows / Kleide die Worthöhlen aus (2, 198) 71
Verwaist (2, 212) / Four ells of earth 73
Verworfene (2, 290) / Degenerate 87
Voices, scored into / Stimmen (1, 147) 1
Vom Anblick der Amseln (2, 94) / The sight of the songbirds at dusk 34
Von der Orchis (2, 64) / Go back and add up 27
Walls of speech, space inwards / Redewände (2, 211) 72
We always find ourselves / Ungewaschen, unbemalt (2, 333) 91
Weather hand / Wetterfühlige Hand (2, 309) 89
Weiss (2, 217) / White, white, white 78
Weissgeräusche (2, 146) / White noises, bundled 53
145
Weissgrau (2, 19) / Gray-white of sheer 18

Wenn Ich nicht weiss, nicht weiss (2, 154) / When I don’t know,
when I don’t know 56
Wer gab die Runde aus? (2, 224) / Who stood that round? 82
Wer herrscht? (2, 116) / Who 39
Wet from the world / Die abgewrackten Tabus (2, 168) 60
Wetterfühlige Hand (2, 309) / Weather hand 89
When I don’t know, when I don’t know / Wenn Ich nicht weiss,
nicht weiss (2, 154) 56
White noises, bundled / Weissgeräusche (2, 146) 53
White, white, white / Weiss (2, 217) 78
Who / Wer herrscht? (2, 116) 39
Who stood that round? / Wer gab die Runde aus? (2, 224) 82
Windfeld bound for winter: this / Angewintertes
Windfeld (2, 222) 81
With wine and being lost, with / Bei Wein und
Verlorenheit (1, 213) 5
Wohin mir das Wort (1, 273) / How low could it go, my
once immortal word 12
You forget you forget / Den verkieselten Spruch (2, 79) 31
You with the dark slingshot / Du mit der Finsterzwille (2, 350) 93
Your heart manholed / Das ausgeschachtete Herz (2, 150) 54
146
about the author
p au l c e l a n is widely considered to be the greatest postwar German

poet. Born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz (then part of Romania,
today in Ukraine), he lived in France from 1948 until his death in 1970.
Among the translations of his work into English are Last Poems (edited, se-
lected, and translated by K. Washburn and M. Guillemin), Poems of Paul
Celan (edited, selected, and translated by M. Hamburger) and Speech-Grille
and Selected Poems (translated by J. Neugroschel).
about the translators
n i k ol a i p op ov teaches English and Comparative Literature at the Uni-

versity of Washington in Seattle. A James Joyce scholar and translator, he
co-translated with Heather McHugh a collection of the poems of Blaga
Dimitrova, Because the Sea Is Black (Wesleyan, 1989).
h e at h e r m c h u g h is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at

the University of Washington. In addition to six acclaimed books of poetry
and the collection of essays Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan,
1994) she has translated poems by Jean Follain and Euripides’ Cyclops.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Celan, Paul.
[Poems. English. Selections]
Glottal stop : 101 poems by Paul Celan ; translated by Nikolai Popov
and Heather McHugh.
p. cm. — (Wesleyan poetry)
Poems originally published in German in the author’s Gesammelte Werke
or in Eingedunkelt und Gedichte aus dem Umkreis von Eingedunkelt.
Frankfurt-am-Main : Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983, 1991.
Includes index.
isbn 0–8195–6448–6 (alk. paper)
1. Celan, Paul—Translations into English. I. Popov, Nikolai B.
II. McHugh, Heather, 1948– . III. Title. IV. Series.
pt2605.e4 a25 2000
831'.914—dc21 00–009307
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Paul Celan: Glottal Stop page i

Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh

wesleyan university press

Published by Wesleyan University Press,

The poems translated in this book (with the

Works by Paul Celan copyrighted by Suhrkamp

Paul Celan, “Stimmen,” “Sommerbericht,” taken

UK and Commonwealth rights to publish a new

Free of dross, free of dross 66

Particles, patriarchs, buried 99

Index of English Titles/First Lines

The following magazines originally published or reprinted (some-

1. We had in mind such creditable collections as those published by Mi-

2. Paul Celan, “The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the

Because ﬁrst and foremost we value the experience of the poetry,

Paul Celan’s own translations of Emily Dickinson are astonish-

3. As John Felstiner puts it, “in translating, as in parody, critical and

DES: one line long: folio dropped 7 points

minds; we were consoled to know that so too was Celan. Ultimately

DES: one line long: folio dropped 7 points

easy for a biographizing sensibility to read his literary aporias into

DES: one line long: folio dropped 7 points

DES: one line long: folio dropped 7 points

Voices, scored into

What stood by you

Voices from the nettles:

Come to us on your hands.

Voices, night-knotted, ropes

Dome yourself over, world:

Voices that make your heart

Voices, guttural, amid the debris,

Launch here the boats I manned,

Amidships, when an evil wind takes charge,

Voices inside the ark:

No longer crossed, the carpet of thyme

Encounters once again with

With wine and being lost, with

I rode through the snow, do you read me,

They cowered when

In the dooryard, puckered mint,

Mind this hour, it is your time,

Mine’s the mouth, though it is still,

Some spell narrowness, some breadth,

I make one, and we make three,

In the dooryard, puckered mint,

my soul, you were

right away—downheartedness, you

then once again it hemmed us in

To one who stood outside the door, one

Rebbe, I gnashed my teeth, Rebbe

And Rebbe, slam shut evening’s door.

Rip open morning’s, Re—

How low could it go, my once-immortal word—

Rhymes in the night-house, breath in the dreck,

Pain, the Syllable

It gave itself into your hand:

And numbers were

tied itself into

Break the coin of breath

Didn’t the hands come along, holding their vigil,

Did the dove go astray, could her ankle-band

Roof-pitched slipway—that which ﬂoats

Upon arrival in Berlin,