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as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry,
would be a way of turning us toward that which is
absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart
in the world”. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clearing,
betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz,
however, God was under radical question. The space
left by Him, on the other hand, was not:
Psalm
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)
One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this
poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and
an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable
only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use
Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has
brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and
Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed
here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates
before any of these allusion are understood.
It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a
poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the
author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and
Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems.
Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title
of his 1959 collection Sprachgitter – Speech Grille.
Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and
when the family visited her, she would remain behind
a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation.
One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is
part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue-
Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actually
called “Poetry as Experience”. It characterises
the poem as something always returning to its source,
154
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