Happy birthday, Paul Celan! Here are some quotes from the author.

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”

“The poem becomes…desperate conversation.”

“He speaks truly who speaks the shade.”

“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.”

“A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.”

“Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa’s head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?”

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

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

“No one
bears witness for the
witness.”

“Yet where danger lies,
grows that which saves.”

“Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.”

“We
just don’t know, you know
we
just don’t know,
what
counts.”