by Paul Celan
before our
hungry, immovable
pores,
an also-sun, between
two brightshots
abyss.
Come, make the world mean with yourself
come, let me fill you up with
all that's mine,
One with you I am,
to capture us,
even now.
A BOOTFULL OF BRAIN
set out in the rain:
there will be a going, a great one,
far across the borders
they draw us.
THE TRUMPET'S PART
deep in the glowing
Empty-text,
at lamp's level,
in the timehole:
listen your way in
mouthwise.
THE POLES
are in us,
insurmountable
while awake,
we sleep across, to the Gate
of Mercy,
I lose you to you, that
is my snow-comfort,
say that Jerusalem is,
say it, as if I was this
your Whiteness
as if you were
mine,
as if without us we could be we
I leaf you open, forever,
you pray, you lay
us free.
The Kingsway
behind the fake door,
before it, deathed
in by the counter-
sign, the lionsign,
the constellation, keel up,
mired in,
you, with the
wound-fathoming
eyelash.
There Also
comes a meaning
down the narrowest cut,
it is breached
by the deadliest of our
standing marks.
I Drink Wine
from two glasses
and harrow
the king's caesura
like that other
does Pindar,
God turns in the tuning fork
as one of the small
just ones,
from the lottery drum falls
our doit.
SOMETHING SHALL BE.
later,
that fills itself with you
and lifts itself
to a mouth
Out of shattered
madness
I raise myself
and watch my hand
as it draws the one
single
circle.
Nothingness,
for the sake
of our names
— they gather us in —
seals,
the end believes us
the beginning,
before the
masters en-
silencing us,
in the undifferentiated, attesting
itself: the clammy
brightness.
IN THE BELLSHAPE
the
believing-unbelieving
souls gasp,
star-nonsense
propagates itself, even with my
hand, in desert-sense en-
duned by you,
we got here
long ago.
As I
carry the ringshadow
you carry the ring,
something, used to heaviness,
strains itself
lifting us,
infinite
de-eternalizing you.
STRANGENESS
has netted us,
transience reaches
helplessly through us,
take my pulse, it too,
into yourself,
then we shall prevail
against you, against me,
something enclothes us
in dayskin, in nightskin,
for the game with the highest, epi-
leptic seriousness.
ILLUMINATED,
the seeds
which I in you
won swimming,
rowed free,
the names — they
sail the straits,
a blessing, up front,
compacts into
a weather-sensing
fist.
ALL POEMS IN THIS SECTION TRANSLATED BY PIERRE JORIS
Previous page:
Gisele Celan-Lestrange,
etching, no. 11 in the series
Schwarzmaut.
CONVERSATION IN THE MOUNTAINS
One evening, when the sun had set and not only the sun, the Jew — Jew and son of a Jew — went off, left his house and went off, and with him his name, his unpronounceable name, went and came, came trotting along, made himself heard, came with a stick, came over stones, do you hear me, you do, it's me, me, me and whom you hear, whom you think you hear, me and the other — so he went off, you could hear it, went off one evening when various things had set, went under clouds, went in the shadow, his own and not his own — because the Jew, you know, what does he have that is really his own, that is not borrowed, taken and not returned — so he went off and walked along this road, this beautiful, incomparable road, walked like Lenz through the mountains, he who had been allowed to live down in the plain where he belongs, he, the Jew, walked and walked. Walked, yes, along this road, this beautiful road.
And who do you think came to meet him? His cousin came to meet him, his first cousin, a quarter of a Jew's life older, tall he came, came, he too, in the shadow, borrowed of course — because, I ask and ask you, how could he come with his own when God had made him a Jew — came, tall, came to meet the other, Gross approached Klein, and Klein, the Jew, silenced his stick before the stick of the Jew Gross.
The stones, too, were silent. And it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, one and the other.
So it was quiet, quiet up there in the mountains. But it was not quiet for long, because when a Jew comes along and meets another, silence cannot last, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and nature are strangers to each other, have always been and still are, even today, even here.
So there they are, the cousins. On the left, the turk's-cap lily blooms, blooms wild, blooms like nowhere else. And on the right, corn-salad, and dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink, not far off. But they, those cousins, have no eyes, alas. Or, more exactly: they have, even they have eyes, but with a veil hanging in front of them, no, not in front, behind them, a moveable veil. No sooner does an image enter than it gets caught in the web, and a thread starts spinning, spinning itself around the image, a veil-thread; spins itself around the image and begets a child, half image, half veil.
Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road in the mountains, the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause, an empty space between the words, a blank — you see all the syllables stand around, waiting. They are tongue and mouth as before, these two, and in their eyes there hangs a veil, and you, poor flowers, are not even there, are not blooming, you do not exist, and July is not July.
The windbags! Even now, when their tongues stumble dumbly against their teeth and their lips won't round themselves, they have something to say to each other. All right then, let them talk .. .
"You've come a long way, have come all the way here ..."
"I have. I've come, like you."
"I know."
"You know. You know and see: The earth folded up here, folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there is water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from even farther up, from the glaciers, and one could say, but one shouldn't, that this is the language that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me — because, I ask you, for whom is it meant, the earth, not for you, I say, is it meant, and not for me — a language, well, wit
hout I and without You nothing but He, nothing but it, you understand, and She, nothing but that."
"I understand, I do. After all, I've come a long way, I've come like you."
"I know."
"You know and you want to ask: And even so you've come all the way, come here even so — why, and what for?"
"Why, and what for ... Because I had to talk, maybe, to myself or to you, talk with my mouth and tongue, not just with my stick. Because to whom does it talk, my stick? It talks to the stones, and the stones — to whom do they talk?"
"To whom should they talk, cousin? They do not talk, they speak, and who speaks does not talk to anyone, cousin, he speaks because nobody hears him, nobody and Nobody, and then he says, himself, not his mouth or his tongue, he, and only he, says: Do you hear me?"
"Do you hear me, he says — I know, cousin, I know... Do you hear me, he says, I'm here. I am here, I've come. I've come with my stick, me and no other, me and not him, me with my hour, my undeserved hour, me who have been hit, who have not been hit, me with my memory, with my lack of memory, me, me, me ..."
"He says, he says ... Do you hear me, he says ... And Do-youhear-me, of course, Do-you-hear-me does not say anything, does not answer, because Do-you-hear-me is one with the glaciers, is three in one, and not for men . .. The green-and-white there, with the turk'scap lily, with the corn-salad ... But I, cousin, I who stand here on this road, here where I do not belong, today, now that it has set, the sun and its light, I, here, with the shadow, my own and not my own, I — I who can tell you:
"I lay on the stones, back then, you know, on the stone tiles; and next to me the others who were like me, the others who were different and yet like me, my cousins. They lay there sleeping, sleeping and not sleeping, dreaming and not dreaming, and they did not love me, and I did not love them because I was one, and who wants to love One when there are many, even more than those lying near me, and who wants to be able to love all, and I don't hide it from you, I did not love them who could not love me, I loved the candle which burned in the left corner, I loved it because it burned down, not because it burned down, because it was his candle, the candle he had lit, our mothers' father, because on that evening there had begun a day, a particular day: the seventh, the seventh to be followed by the first, the seventh and not the last, cousin, I did not love it, I loved its burning down and, you know, I haven't loved anything since.
"No. Nothing. Or maybe whatever burned down like that candle on that day, the seventh, not the last; not on the last day, no, because here I am, here on this road which they say is beautiful, here I am, by the turk's-cap lily and the corn-salad, and a hundred yards over, over there where I could go, the larch gives way to the stone-pine, I see it, I see it and don't see it, and my stick which talked to the stones, my stick is silent now, and the stones you say can speak, and in my eyes there is that moveable veil, there are veils, moveable veils, you lift one, and there hangs another, and the star there — yes, it is up there now, above the mountains — if it wants to enter it will have to wed and soon it won't be itself, but half veil and half star, and I know, I know, cousin, I know I've met you here, and we talked, a lot, and those folds there, you know they are not for men, and not for us who went off and met here, under the star, we the Jews who came like Lenz through the mountains, you Gross and me Klein, you, the windbag, and me, the windbag, with our sticks, with our unpronounceable names, with our shadows, our own and not our own, you here and me here —
"me here, me, who can tell you all this, could have and don't and didn't tell you; me with a turk's-cap lily on my left, me with cornsalad, me with my burned candle, me with the day, me with the days, me here and there, me, maybe accompanied — now — by the love of those I didn't love, me on the way to myself, up here."
THE MERIDIAN
Speech on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize,
Darmstadt, October 22, 7960
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Art, you will remember, is a puppet-like, iambic, five-footed thing without — and this last characteristic has its mythological validation in Pygmalion and his statue — without offspring.
In this form, it is the subject of a conversation in Danton's Death which takes place in a room, not yet in the Conciergerie, a conversation which, we feel, could go on forever if there were no snags.
There are snags.
Art comes up again. It comes up in another work of Georg Buchner's, in Woyzeck, among other, nameless people in a yet more "ashen light before the storm" — if I may use the phrase Moritz Heimann intended for Danton's Death. Here, in very different times, art comes presented by a carnival barker and has no longer, as in that conversation, anything to do with "glowing," "roaring," "radiant" creation, but is put next to the "creature as God made it" and the "nothing" this creature is "wearing." This time, art comes in the shape of a monkey. But it is art all right. We recognize it by its "coat and trousers."
It — art — comes to us in yet a third play of Buchner's, in Leonce and Lena. Time and lighting are unrecognizable: we are "fleeing towards paradise"; and "all clocks and calendars" are soon to be "broken" or, rather, "forbidden." But just before that moment, "two persons of the two sexes" are introduced: "two world-famous automatons have arrived." And a man who claims to be "the third and perhaps strangest of the two" invites us, "with a rattling voice," to admire what we see: "Nothing but art and mechanics, nothing but cardboard and springs."
Art appears here in larger company than before, but obviously of its own sort. It is the same art: art as we already know it. Valeria is only another name for the barker.
Art, ladies and gentlemen, with all its attributes and future additions, is also a problem and, as we can see, one that is variable, tough, long lived, let us say, eternal.
A problem which allows a mortal, Camille, and a man whom we can only understand through his death, Danton, to join word to word to word. It is easy to talk about art.
But when there is talk of art, there is often somebody who does not really listen.
More precisely: somebody who hears, listens, looks ... and then does not know what it was about. But who hears the speaker, "sees him speaking," who perceives language as a physical shape and also — who could doubt it within Buchner's work — breath, that is, direction and destiny.
I am talking — you have long guessed it as she comes to you year after year, not by accident quoted so frequently — I am talking of Lucile.
The snags which halt the conversation in Danton's Death are brutal. They take us to the Place de la Revolution: "the carts drive up and stop."
They are all there, Danton, Camille, and the rest. They do not lack words, even here, artful, resonant words, and they get them out. Words — in places Biichner need only quote — about going to their death together; Fabre would even like to die "twice"; everybody rises to the occasion. Only a few voices, "some" — unnamed — "voices," find they "have heard it before, it is boring."
And here where it all comes to an end, in those long last moments when Camille — no, not the Camille, a fellow prisoner — when this other Camille dies a theatrical, I am tempted to say iambic death which we only two scenes later come to feel as his own, through another person's words, not his, yet kin — here where it all comes to its end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of "puppet" and "string," here Lucile who is blind against art, Lucile for whom language is tangible and like a person, Lucile is suddenly there with her "Long live the king!"
After all those words on the platform (the guillotine, mind you) — what a word!
It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the "string," which does not bow to the "bystanders and old warhorses of history." It is an act of freedom. It is a step.
True, it sounds — and in the context of what I now, today, dare say about it, this is perhaps no accident — it sounds at first like allegiance to the "ancien regime."
But it is not. Allow me, who grew up on the writings of
Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, to insist: this is not homage to any monarchy, to any yesterday worth preserving.
It is homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings.
This, ladies and gentlemen, has no definitive name, but I believe that this is ... poetry.
"Oh, art!" You see I am stuck on this word of Camille's.
I know we can read it in different ways, we can give it a variety of accents: the acute of the present, the grave accent of history (literary history included), the circumflex (marking length) of eternity.
I give it — I have no other choice — I give it an acute accent.
Art — "oh, art!" — besides being changeable, has the gift of ubiquity. We find it again in Lenz, but, let me stress this, as in Danton's Death, only as an episode.
"Over dinner, Lenz recovered his spirits: they talked literature, he was in his element..."
"... The feeling that there is life in a work was more important than those other two, was the only criterion in matters of art. . ."
I picked only two sentences. My bad conscience about the grave accent bids me draw your attention to their importance in literary history. We must read this passage together with the conversation in Danton's Death. Here, Bikhner's aesthetics finds expression. It leads us from the Lenz-fragment to Reinhold Lenz, author of Notes on the Theatre, and, back beyond the historical Lenz, to Mercier's seminal "Elargissez 1'art." This passage opens vistas: it anticipates Naturalism and Gerhart Hauptmann. Here we must look for the social and political roots of Biichner's work, and here we will find them.
