Paul Celan

Paul Celan was a German/Romanian

Jewish poet whose family was

annihilated in Nazi concentration camps.

He was writing his poetry, then, in the

language that had had a hand in

perpetrating the Holocaust. 

Exiled German philosopher Theodor

Adorno famously wrote that there could

be no poetry after Auschwitz. 

Like noone else, Celan felt that certainty;

and yet, till his suicide in 1970, he wrote

poems like this one (from the collection

"Die Niemands Rose," my translation):

TÜBINGEN, JÄNNER 1961

Zur Blindheit über-

redete Augen.

Ihre – “ein

Rätsel ist Rein-

entsprungenes“ –, ihre

Erinnerung an

schwimmende Hölderlintürme, möven-

umschwirrt.

Besuche ertrunkener Schreiner bei

diesen

tauchenden Worten:

Käme,

käme ein Mensch,

käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit

dem Lichtbart der

Patriarchen: er dürfte,

spräch er von dieser

Zeit, er

dürfte

nur lallen und lallen,

immer-, immer-

zuzu.

(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)

TÜBINGEN, JANUARY 1961

Eyes con-

vinced to blindness.

Their – “a

riddle is pure-

origin” –, their

memory of

floating Hölderlin towers, swarmed

by gulls.

Visits by drowned cabinetmakers while

these

diving words:

If a person were,

were to come,

if a person were to come to the world,

today, with the lightbeard of

the patriarchs: he could,

if he spoke of this

time, he

could

only babble and babble,

always-, always-

atitatit.

(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)