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 truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.”
“Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.”
“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.”
“What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit?”
“I know, I know and you know, we knew, we did not know, we were there, after all, and not there and at times when only the void stood between us we got all the way to each other.”
“The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“I write to you to tell you that you don’t stop being present, close by, that you accompany me everywhere I go, that this world is you, you alone, and that because of that it is larger, that it has found, thanks to you, a new dimension, a new coordinate, the one I could no longer bring myself to grant it, that it is no longer that implacable solitude that forced me at each moment to sack what rose in front of me, to hound myself — that everything changes, changes, changes under your gaze.”
“They’ve healed me to pieces.”
“The search for ground lights is not enough. There is the axis to be followed and…forgotten. You must above all find lightness, buoyancy, the permanent defiance of gravity.”
“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.”
“Between always and never.”
“We
just don’t know, you know
we
just don’t know,
what
counts.”
“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.”
“I can still see you: an echo
that can be groped towards with antenna
words, on the ridge of parting.
Your face quietly shies
when suddenly
there is lamplike brightness
inside me, just at the point
where most painfully one says, never.”
“The sea,
tasted, drunk away, dreamed away. An hour
soul-eclipsed. The next, an autumn light,
offered up to a blind
feeling which came that way. Others, many,
with no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and avoided.
Foundlings, stars,
black, full of language: named
after an oath which silence annulled.”
“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.”
“From beholding the blackbirds, evenings,
through the unbarred, that
surrounds me,
I promised myself weapons.
From beholding the weapons— hands,
from beholding the hands— the long ago
by the sharp, flat
pebble written line
— Wave, you
carried it hither, honed it,
gave yourself, un-
losable, up,
shoresand, you take,
take in,
sea-oats, blow
yours along— ,
the line, the line,
through which we swim, entwined,
twice each millennium,
all that singing at the fingers,
that even the through us living,
magnificent-unexplainable
flood does not believe us.”
“How could something new and pure issue from this? It may be from the remotest regions of the spirit that words and figures will come, images and gestures, veiled and unveiled as in a dream. When they meet in their heady course, and the spark of the wonderful is born from the marriage of strange and most strange, then I will know I am facing the new radiance. It will give me a dubious look because, even though I have conjured it up, it exists beyond the concepts of my wakeful thinking; its light is not daylight; it is inhabited by figures which I do not recognize, but know at first sight. Its weight has a different heaviness; its colour speaks to the new eyes which my closed lids have given one another; my hearing has wandered into my fingertips and learns to see; my heart, now that it lives behind my forehead, tastes the laws of a new, unceasing, free motion. I follow my wandering senses into this new world of the spirit and come to know freedom. Here, where I am free, I can see what nasty lies the other side told me.”
