Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
onciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It
welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt
away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers
discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it
was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a
musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching
should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Celan’s
subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform
readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there
was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible
beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the
progressive movement of the civilisation of the book,
enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a
Beethoven sonata.
Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What
does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a
means of reminding us of what has happened and what
it means, then one wonders why the facts have not
been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have
never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writersurvivor,
reminds us that “the numbers and the facts
were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a
number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”
Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something
else, something more than the facts. But, in general,
that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even
more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something
else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a
dictionary. Indeed Spike quite rightly announces itself
to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the
alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer.
A word – you know:
a corpse.
Let us wash it,
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
towards heaven.
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of
literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to
most post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality,
matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted
words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem
‘Nocturnally Pouting’, itself a dark reflection on a bus
journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence
of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the
“greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of
the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless
flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who
“stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bareheaded,
hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt
that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly
subsists, like summer.”
The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that
reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn
150
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z