Paul Celan_Selections

by Paul Celan

to the serpentheaded free-

  ropes —: a

  knot

  (and counter- and contra- and yet- and twin- and thou-

  sandknot), which

  the carnival-sucking brood

  of martenstars in the abyss

  spell-, spell-, spelled

  out, out.

  AND WITH THE BOOK FROM TARUSSA

  All poets are Jews

  — Marina Tsvetayeva

  Of the

  constellation of Canis, of the

  bright-star in it and the dwarf-

  light that also weaves

  on roads mirrored earthwards,

  of

  pilgrim-staffs, there too, of the south, alien

  and nightfiber-near

  like unsepulchered words,

  roaming

  in the orbit of attained

  goals and stelae and cradles.

  Of things

  sooth-said and fore-told and spoken over to you,

  of things

  talked upwards,

  on the alert, akin to one

  of one's own heart-stones, that one spewed out

  together with their in-

  destructible clockwork, out

  into unland and untime. Of such

  ticking and ticking amid

  the gravel-cubes with

  (going back on a hyena spoor

  traceable upwards)

  the ancestral

  line of Those-

  of-the-Name-and-Its-

  Round-Abyss.

  Of

  a tree, of one.

  Yes, of it too. And of the woods around it. Of the woods

  Untrodden, of the

  thought they grew from, as sound

  and half-sound and changed sound and terminal sound, Scythian

  rhymes

  in the meter

  of the temple and of the driven,

  with

  breathed steppe-

  grass written into the heart

  of the hour-caesuras — into the realm,

  the widest of

  realms, into

  the great internal rhyme

  beyond

  the zone of mute nations, into yourself

  language-scale, word-scale, home-

  scale of exile.

  Of this tree, these woods.

  Of the bridge's

  broadstone, from which

  he bounced across into

  life, full-fledged

  by wounds — of the

  Pont Mirabeau.

  Where the Oka doesn't flow. Et quels

  amours! (Cyrillic, friends, I rode

  this too across the Seine,

  rode it across the Rhine.)

  Of a letter, of it.

  Of the one-letter, East-letter. Of the hard and

  tiny word-heap, of the

  unarmed eye that it

  transmits to

  the three

  belt-stars of Orion — Jacob's

  staff, you,

  once again you come walking! —

  on the

  celestial chart that opened for it.

  Of the table where this happened.

  Of a word, from the heap

  on which it, the table

  became a galley-seat, from the Oka River

  and its waters.

  Of the passing word that

  a galley-slave gnash-echos, into the late-summer reeds

  of his keen-

  eared thole-pin:

  Colchis.

  from ATEMWENDE / BREATHTURN

  You may confidently

  regale me with snow:

  as often as I strode through summer

  shoulder to shoulder with the mulberry tree,

  its youngest leaf

  shrieked.

  In the rivers north of the future

  I cast the net, which you

  hesitantly weight

  with shadows stones

  wrote.

  To stand, in the shadow

  of the stigma in the air.

  Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.

  Unrecognized,

  for you

  alone.

  With all that has room in it,

  even without

  language.

  THREADSUNS

  above the grayblack wastes.

  A tree-

  high thought

  grasps the light-tone: there are

  still songs to sing beyond

  mankind.

  Wordaccretion, volcanic,

  drowned out by searoar.

  Above,

  the flooding mob

  of the contra-creatures: it

  flew a flag — portrait and replica

  cruise vainly timeward.

  Till you hurl forth the word-

  moon, out of which

  the wonder ebb occurs

  and the heart-

  shaped crater

  testifies naked for the beginnings,

  the kings-

  births.

  SINGABLE REMNANT —the outline

  of him, who through

  the sicklescript broke through unvoiced,

  apart, at the snowplace.

  Whirling

  under comet-

  brows

  the gaze's bulk, towards

  which the eclipsed, tiny

  heart-satellite drifts

  with the

  spark caught outside.

  — Disenfranchised lip, announce,

  that something happens, still,

  not far from you.

  No Sandart Anymore, no sandbook, no masters.

  Nothing in the dice. How

  many mutes?

  Seventen.

  Your question — your answer.

  Your chant, what does it know?

  Deepinsnow,

  Eepinno,

  I-i-o.

  HARBOR

  Sorehealed: where-,

  when you were like me, criss-

  and crossdreamt by

  schnappsbottlenecks at the

  whore table

  — cast

  my happiness aright, Seahair,

  heap up the wave, that carries me, Blackcurse,

  break your way

  through the hottest womb,

  Icesorrowpen —,

  where-

  to

  didn't you come to lie with me, even

  on the benches

  at Mother Clausen's, yes, she

  knows, how often I sang all

  the way up into your throat, hey-diddle-doo,

  like the bilberryblue

  alder of homeland with all its leaves,

  hey-doodle-dee,

  you, like the

  astral-flute from

  beyond the worldridge — there too

  we swam, nakednudes, swam,

  the abyssverse on

  the fire red forehead — unconsumed by

  fire the deep-

  inside flooding gold

  dug its paths upwards —,

  here,

  with eyelashed sails,

  remembrance too drove past, slowly

  the conflagration jumped over, cut-

  off, you,

  cut off on

  the two blue-

  black memory-

  barges,

  but driven on now also

  by the thousand-

  arm, with which I held you,

  they cruise, past starthrow-dives,

  our still drunk, still drinking

  by worldly mouths — I name only them —

  till over there at the timegreen clocktower

  the net-, the numberskin soundlessly

  peels off— a delusion-dock,

  swimming, before it,

  off-world-white the

  letters of the

  cat, the trolley, life, which

  the sense-

  greedy sentences dredge up, after midn
ight,

  at which

  neptunic sin throws its corn-

  schnapps-colored towrope,

  between

  twelve-

  toned lovesoundbuoys

  — draw-well-winch back then, with you

  it sings in the no longer

  inland choir —

  the beaconlightships come dancing,

  from afar, from Odessa,

  the leadline,

  which sinks with us, true to our burden,

  Owlglasses all that

  downwards, upwards, and why not? sorehealed, where-,

  when-

  hither and past and hither.

  THE JUGGLERDRUM,

  from my heartpenny loud.

  The rungs of the ladder, up

  which Ulysses, my monkey, clambers toward Ithaca,

  rue de Longchamp, one hour

  after the spilled wine:

  add that to the image,

  which casts us home into

  the dice-cup, where I lie by you,

  unplayable.

  IN PRAGUE

  Half-death,

  suckled on our life,

  lay ash-image-true around us —

  we too

  kept on drinking, soul-crossed, two swords,

  stitched to heavenstones, born of wordblood,

  in the nightbed,

  larger and larger

  we grew, intergrafted, there was

  no name left for

  what urged us on (one of thirty-

  -and-how-many

  was my living shadow,

  who climbed up the delusion-stairs to you?)

  a tower,

  the half-one built into the Whither,

  a Hradshin

  all of goldmaker's No,

  bone-Hebrew,

  ground to sperm,

  ran through the hourglass,

  through which we swam, two dreams now, tolling

  against time, on the squares.

  Ashglory behind

  your shaken-knotted

  hands at the threeway.

  Pontic erstwhile: here,

  a drop,

  on

  the drowned rudder blade,

  deep

  in the petrified oath,

  it roars up.

  (On the vertical

  breathrope, in those days,

  higher than above,

  between two painknots, while

  the glossy

  Tatarmoon climbed up to us,

  I dug myself into you and into you.)

  Ash-

  glory behind

  you threeway

  hands.

  The cast-in-front-of-you, from

  the East, terrible.

  Noone

  bears witness for the

  witness.

  The Written hollows itself, the

  spoken, seagreen,

  burns in the bays,

  in the liquified names

  the dolphins dart,

  in the eternalized Nowhere, here,

  in the memory of the over-

  loud bells in — where only?

  who

  pants

  in this

  shadow-quadrat, who

  from beneath it

  shimmers, shimmers, shimmers?

  FRIHED

  In the house of the doubled delusion,

  where the stoneboats fly

  over

  Whiteking's pier, toward the secrets,

  where finally with

  cut cord the

  man-of-war-word cruises,

  I, reed-pith nourished, am

  in you, on

  wild ducks' ponds,

  I sing —

  what do I sing?

  The saboteur's

  coat

  with the red, the white

  circles around the

  bullet

  holes

  — through them

  you sight the with us driving

  free-

  starry Above —

  covers us, now,

  the verdigris-nobility from the quay,

  with its burned-brick thoughts

  round about the forehead,

  heaps the spirit round, the spindrift,

  quick

  the noises wither

  this side and that side of mourning,

  the crown's

  closer-

  sailing pus-prong

  in the eye of one

  born crooked

  writes poems

  in Danish.

  SOLVE

  De-easterned tomb-

  tree, split into

  firebrands:

  past the Poison-

  Palatinates, past the cathedrals,

  upstream, down-

  stream, rafted

  by the tiny-flaring, by the

  free

  punctuation mark of the

  script salvaged and dis-

  solved into the count-

  less to-be-

  named un-

  pronounceable

  names.

  COAGULA

  Your wound

  too, Rosa.

  And the hornslight of your

  Romanian buffaloes

  in star's stead above the

  sandbed, in the

  talking, red-

  ember-mighty

  alembic.

  ONCE

  I did hear him,

  he did wash the world,

  unseen, nightlong,

  real.

  One and unending,

  annihilated,

  Ted.

  Light was. Salvation.

  ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS

  from FADENSONNEN/THREADSUNS

  FRANKFURT, SEPTEMBER

  Blind, light-

  bearded partition.

  A cockchaferdream

  floodlights it.

  Behind it, complaint-rastered,

  Freud's forehead opens up,

  the tear, hard-

  silenced outside,

  links on with the sentence:

  "For the last

  time psycho-

  logy."

  The imitation

  jackdaw

  breakfasts.

  The glottal stop

  sings.

  DETOUR-

  MAPS, phosphorous,

  far behind Here by sheer

  ring-fingers beaten.

  Travelluck, look:

  The tripdart, two

  inches from the target,

  topples

  into the aorta.

  The shared goods, ten

  hundredweight

  folie a deux,

  wake up

  in the vultureshadow,

  in the seventeenth liver, at the foot

  of the stuttering

  information mast.

  Before it,

  in the slated watershield, the

  three standing whales

  head the ball.

  A right eye

  flashes.

  Spasms. I love you, psalms,

  the feeling-walls deep in the you-ravine

  rejoice, seedpainted one,

  Eternal, de-eternalized are you

  eternalized, Uneternal, you,

  hey,

  into you, into you

  I sing the bone-rod-scratch,

  Redred, far behind the pubic hair

  harped, in the caves,

  outside, all around

  the unending none-whatsoever-canon,

  you throw me the nine times

  twined, dripping

  eyetooth-wreath.

  PAU, LATER

  In the corner of

  your eyes, stranger,

  the albigenses-shadow -

  after

  the Waterloo-Plein,

  towards the orphaned

  raffia shoe, towards

  the a
lso bartered Amen,

  into the eternal

  housegap I

  sing you:

  so that Baruch, he who never

  weeps,

  may grind aright

  all around you the

  angular,

  ununderstood, seeing

  tear.

  The Stallion with the flowering wick,

  levitating, at pass-

  height,

  comet brilliance on

  the rump.

  You, in the con-

  spirationary torrents un-

  locked, the

  bouncing breasts in the sharp

  verse-fibula-yoke,

  fall with me through

  images, rocks, numbers.

  LYON, LES ARCHERS

  The iron spike, reared,

  in the brickniche:

  the co-millennium,

  instranges itself, unconquerable,

  follows

  your driving eyes,

  now,

  with glances cast here by dice

  you wake, who is beside you,

  she becomes heavier,

  heavier,

  you too, with all

  the instrangedness in you,

  instrange yourself,

  deeper,

  the One

  string

  tenses its pain between you,