by Paul Celan
the missing target
radiates, bow.
THE INDUSTRIOUS
mineral resources, homey,
the heated syncope,
the not-to-be-deciphered
jubilee,
the completely glassed in
spider-altars in the all-
overtowering low building,
the intermediate sounds
(even yet?)
the shadowpalavers,
the anxieties, icetrue,
flightclear,
the baroquely cloaked,
language-swallowing showerroom,
semantically floodlit,
the uninscribed wall
of a standing-cell:
here
live yourself
straightthrough, without clock.
WHEN I DON'T KNOW, DON'T KNOW,
without you, without you, without a You,
they all come,
the
freebeheaded, who
lifelong brainlessly sang
of the tribe
of the You-less:
Aschrej,
a word without meaning,
transtibetan,
injected into the
Jewess
Pallas
Athena's
helmeted ovaries,
and when he,
he,
fetally,
harps Carpathian notnot,
then the Allemande
bobbins her lace for
the vomiting im-
mortal
song.
YOU Were my death:
you I could hold,
when all fell from me.
LINE THE WORDCAVES
with panther skins,
widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,
sense-hither and sense-thither,
give them courtyards, chambers, trapdoors
and wildnesses, parietal,
and listen for their second
and each time second and second
tone.
NEAR. IN THE AORTIC ARCH.
in the light-blood:
the light-word.
Mother Rachel
weeps no more.
Carried over:
all the weepings.
Quiet, in the coronary arteries,
unconstricted:
Ziv, that light.
IMAGINE
Imagine:
the moorsoldier from Masada
teaches himself homeland, in
the most inextinguishable way,
against
all barbs in the wire.
Imagine:
the eyeless without shape
lead you free through the throng, you
grow stronger and
stronger.
Imagine: your
own hand
has held once
more this
into life re-
suffered
piece of
inhabitable earth.
Imagine:
that came towards me,
awake to the name, awake to the hand,
forever,
from what cannot be buried.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
from LICHTZWANG/ LIGHTDURESS
SOUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS, On
ward onethousandandone,
daynightly
the Bear-Polka:
they retrain you,
you again become
he.
WE ALREADY LAY
deep in the underbrush, when you
finally crept along.
But we could not
darken over towards you:
there reigned
lightduress.
Contact Mines on your left
moons, Saturn.
Shardsealed
the orbits out there.
Now must be the moment
for a just
birth.
Cleared, this start
also.
Bow-wheelchant with
Corona.
The duskrudder responds,
your torn-
awake vein
unknots itself,
what's left of you, slants,
you gain
altitude.
Once, death was much in demand,
you hid in me.
TWO AT BRANCUSI'S
If one among these stones
were to tell
what conceals it:
here, nearby,
on the old man's crutch-stick,
it would open, as a wound,
into which you'd have to dive,
lonely,
far from my scream, the already also
hewn, white one.
TODTNAUBERG
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,
in the
Hiitte,
written in the book
— whose name did it record
before mine—?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart,
forest turf, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,
crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,
he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,
the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.
TO A BROTHER IN ASIA
The auto-transfigured
cannons
drive toward heaven,
ten
bombers yawn,
a running fire blooms,
as surely as peace,
a handful of rice
expires as your friend.
ORANIENSTRASSE 1
Tin grew in my hand
I didn't know how
to help myself.
I didn't want to mould,
it didn't want to read me —
If now
Ossietzky's last
drinking bowl
could be found,
I'd let the tin
learn from it,
and the host of pilgrims'
staffs
would ensilence, endure the hours.
Strew Ocher into my eyes:
you no longer
live there,
save
on the tomb-
furnishings, save,
pace off the stonerows,
on your hands,
with their dream
paint over the
stamped out
temporal bone's squama,
at the
great
bifurcation re-
count yourself to the ocher,
three times, nine times.
LEAP CENTURIES, leap
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stocked in honeycomb-troughs,
bits
on chips,
the menorah-poem from Berlin,
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
cared for, a
-live?),
reading station in the late-word,
economical ignition points
in the sky,
crests under fire,
feelings, frost-
spindled,
cold start —
with hemoglobin.
TREK-SCOW-TIME.
the half-transformed drag
at one of the worlds,
the dis-elevated one, intimated,
speaks under the foreheads on the bank:
Quits with death, quits with
God.
You Be Like You. always.
Stant up Jh
erosalem inde
erheyff dich
Even he who cut the bond with you,
inde wirt
erluchtet
knots it anew, in the Gehugnis,
mudclots I swallowed, in the tower,
language, dark pilaster strip,
kumi
ori.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
from SCHNEEPART/ SNOWPART
UNWASHED, UNPAINTED,
in Hereafter's
pithead:
there
where we find ourselves,
Earthy, always,
a
belated
bucket conveyor pierces
us cloudtorn,
upwards, downwards,
seditious
piping inside, on Fool's
legs,
the flightshadow in
the iridescing round
heals us in, into the seven-
height,
ice-age-close
the felt swan pair steers
through the hovering
stone-icon
You Lie in the great listening
ambushed, snowed in.
Go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the butcher hooks,
to the red apple stakes
from Sweden —
Here comes the table with the presents,
he turns around an Eden —
The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the saw,
for herself, for none, for everyone —
The Landwehrkanal will not roar
Nothing
stops.
Lilac Air with yellow windowstains,
Orion's belt above the
Anhalter ruin,
Flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,
from
standing bar to
snow bar.
Well-graves in the wind:
someone will play the viola, day downward, in the ale house,
someone will stand on his head in the word Enough,
someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch.
This year
does not roar across,
it throws back December, November,
it turns up its wounds,
it opens up to you, young
grave-
well,
twelvemouth.
THE BREACHED YEAR
with the moldering edges
of delusion bread.
Drink
from my mouth.
UNREADABILITY of this
world. All doubles.
The strong clocks
back the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.
You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
Whorish Else. And eternity
blood-black circumbabeled.
Moored
by your loamy locks
my faith.
Two fingers, far from the hand,
a-row the swampy
oath.
WHAT NEWS
at this voice? What
does this
voice
sew
hither, beyond?
The chasms are
sworn in on White, from them
arose
the snowneedle,
swallow it,
you order the world,
that counts
as much as nine names,
named on knees,
tumuli, tumuli,
you hill away, alive,
come
into the kiss,
a flip of the fin,
steady,
lights up the bays,
you drop
anchor, your shadow
strips you off on the bush,
arrival,
descent,
a chafer recognizes you,
you are approaching
each other,
caterpillars
spin you in,
the Great
Sphere
allows you passage through,
soon
the leaf buttons its vein on to yours,
sparks
have to cross through
for the length of a breath-need,
you are entitled to a tree, a day,
it decodes the number,
a word with all its green
enters itself, transplants itself,
follow it
I HEAR THE AXE HAS BLOSSOMED.
I hear the place is unnamable,
I hear the bread which looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread the woman baked for him,
I hear they call life
the only shelter.
WITH THE VOICE OF THE FIELDMOUSE
you squeak up,
a sharp
clamp,
you bite through the shirt into my skin,
a cloth,
you slide across my mouth,
midway through my
words weighing you, shadow,
down.
IN LIZARD-
skins, Epi-
leptic one,
I bed you, on the cornices,
the gable-
holes
bury us, with lightdung.
Snowpart. arched, to the last,
in the updraft, before
the forever dewindowed
huts:
flatdreams skip
over the
chamfered ice;
to carve out
the wordshadows, to stack them
around the cramp
in the crater.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
from ZEITGEHOFT/TIMEHALO
Almonding You, who only halfspoke,
yet was trembled from the seed on up,
you
I let wait,
you.
And was
not yet
uneyed,
as yet unthorned in the constellation
of the song that begins
star, the song that begins:
Hachnissini
IT STOOD
on your lip : the figsplinter
it stood
around us : Jerusalem
it stood
above the Daneship:
the bright-fir-scent, we thanked it,
I stood
in you.
THE SWELTER
adds us up
in the ass's bray before
Absalom's tomb, here too,
Gethsemane, over there,
the outflanked, whom
does it bury?
At the nearest gate nothing opens,
above you, open one, I carry you toward me.
WE WHO LIKE THE SEAOATS GUARD.
in N'we Awiwim,
the unkissed
stone of a complaint
swells up,
before fulfillment,
it palpates our mouths,
it crosses
over to us,
alloyed to us
in its Whiteness,
we hand ourselves on:
to you and to me,
night, be careful, the sand-
commanded
is strict
with us two.
A RING. FOR BOWDRAWING.
loosed after the wordswarm
that founders behind the world,
with the starlings,
Arrowy one, when you whir toward me,
I know from where,
I forget from where.
The Radiance, yes, the one that
Abu Tor
saw riding toward us, when we
orphaned into each other, for life,
not only up from the wrists —:
a goldbuoy, from
temple-depths,
surveyed the danger that
slyly underlay us.
NITIDOUS YOU
tumor daughter
of a blinding in the cosmos,
seized
by supracelestial search troops
shunted
into the seeing, god-
waiving
starheap Blue,
you turn
gamey
