Quotes from Paul Celan

Between always and never

rush of pine scent (once upon a time), the unlicensed conviction there ought to be another way of saying this.

Illegibility of this world. All things twice over. The strong clocks justify the splitting hour, hoarsely. You , clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.

Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend. die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose.

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.

And the too much of my speaking: heaped up round the little crystal dressed in the style of your silence.

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.

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this.

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

Threadsuns above the grayblack wastes. A tree- high thought grasps the light-tone: there are still songs to sing beyond mankind.

Death is a master from Germany.

To stand in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language.

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.

out of a shardstrewn madness I stand up and look upon my hand, how it draws the one and only circle

Wer auf dem Kopf geht, der hat den Himmel als Abgrund unter sich.

DUMB AUTUMN SMELLS. The marguerite, unbroken, passed between home and chasm through your memory. A strange lostness was palpably present, almost you would have lived.

Ich bin du,wenn ich ich bin.

Sand from the Urns Green as mould is the house of oblivion. Before each of the blowing gates your beheaded minstrel turns blue. For you he beats his drum made of moss and of harsh pubic hair; With a festering toe in the sand he traces your eyebrow. Longer he draws it than ever it was, and the red of your lip. You fill up the urns here and nourish your heart.

water needles stitch up the split shadow-he fights his way deeper down, free.

Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.

They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.

Go blind now, today: eternity also is full of eyes - in them drowns what helped images down the way they came, in them fades what took you out of language, lifted you out with a gesture which you allowed to happen like the dance of the words made of autumn and silk and nothingness.