Breathturn into Timestead (9 page)

Paul Celan himself spoke to the difficulties in his work and suggested that they were inherent to a poetry that dealt with experiencing the actual world: “Imagination and experience, experience and imagination make me think, in view of the darkness of the poem today, of a darkness of the poem qua poem, a constitutive, thus a congenital darkness. In other words: 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.”
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But such darkness is not hermeticism, which would be willed obscurity for the sake of obscurity; it corresponds to the real darkness that surrounds us and that is inside us as much as it is inside the outside world. The poem thus does not try to throw some “light” (or fake “light-ness”) on either inside or outside worlds. This darkness should not, however, discourage us, but should remind us to read Celan with negative capability, that is, with what Keats defined as the needed ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

For me as translator, and, I believe, for anyone coming to his work, Celan's own suggestion as to how to read the work is still the best: “Lesen sie! Immerzu nur lesen, das Verständnis kommt von selbst.” (Just read and keep on reading! Understanding will come by itself.)

*   *   *

There are too many who have contributed in one way or another to this work over the past forty-five years for me to be able to acknowledge them all here individually. May they all be thanked, because without them this project would never have come to fruition—or with a much different and no doubt poorer result. Of course, it is I who am responsible for any and all remaining errors.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

Breathturn

I

Y
OU MAY
confidently

serve me snow:

as often as shoulder to shoulder

with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,

its youngest leaf

shrieked.

 

 

B
Y THE UNDREAMT
etched,

the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland

casts up the life mountain.

From its crumb

you knead anew our names,

which I, an eye

similar

to yours on each finger,

probe for

a place, through which I

can wake myself toward you,

the bright

hungercandle in mouth.

 

 

I
NTO THE FURROWS

of the heavenscoin in the doorcrack

you press the word

from which I rolled,

when I with trembling fists

the roof over us

dismantled, slate for slate,

syllable for syllable, for the copper-

glimmer of the begging-

cup's sake up

there.

 

 

I
N THE RIVERS
north of the future

I cast the net, which you

hesitantly weight

with shadows stones

wrote.

 

 

B
EFORE YOUR LATE FACE
,

a loner

wandering between

nights that change me too,

something came to stand,

which was with us once already, un-

touched by thoughts.

 

 

D
OWN MELANCHOLY'S RAPIDS

past the blank

woundmirror:

There the forty

stripped lifetrees are rafted.

Single counter-

swimmer, you

count them, touch them

all.

 

 

T
HE NUMBERS
, in league

with the images' doom

and counter-

doom.

The clapped-on

skull, at whose

sleepless temple a will-

of-the-wisping hammer

celebrates all that in

worldbeat.

 

 

P
ATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK

of your hand.

From the four-finger-furrow

I root up the

petrified blessing.

 

 

W
HITEGRAY
of

shafted, steep

feeling.

Landinward, hither

drifted sea oats blow

sand patterns over

the smoke of wellchants.

An ear, severed, listens.

An eye, cut in strips,

does justice to all this.

 

 

W
ITH MASTS SUNG EARTHWARD

the sky-wrecks drive.

Onto this woodsong

you hold fast with your teeth.

You are the songfast

pennant.

 

 

T
EMPLECLAMPS
,

eyed by your malar bone.

Its silverglare there

where they gripped:

you and the rest of your sleep—

soon

will be your birthday.

 

 

N
EXT TO THE HAILSTONE
, in

the mildewed corn-

cob, home,

to the late, the hard

November stars obedient:

In the heartthread, the

knit of worm-talk—:

a bowstring, from which

your arrowscript whirrs,

archer.

 

 

T
O 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.

 

 

Y
OUR DREAM
, butting from the watch.

With the wordspoor carved

twelve times

helically into its

horn.

The last butt it delivers.

In the ver-

tical narrow

daygorge, the upward

poling ferry:

it carries

sore readings over.

 

 

W
ITH THE PERSECUTED
in late, un-

silenced,

radiating

league.

The morning-plumb, gilded,

hafts itself to your co-

swearing, co-

scratching, co-

writing

heel.

 

 

T
HREADSUNS

above the grayblack wastes.

A tree-

high thought

grasps the light-tone: there are

still songs to sing beyond

mankind.

 

 

I
N THE SERPENTCOACH
, past

the white cypress,

through the flood

they drove you.

But in you, from

birth,

foamed the other spring,

up the black

ray memory

you climbed to the day.

 

 

S
LICKENSIDES
, fold-axes,

rechanneling-

points:

your terrain.

On both poles

of the cleftrose, legible:

your outlawed word.

Northtrue. Southbright.

 

 

W
ORDACCRETION
, 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.

 

 

(
I
KNOW YOU
, you are the deeply bowed,

I, the transpierced, am subject to you.

Where flames a word, would testify for us both?