Collected Prose

life, Celan poured all his grief and anger into his work. There is no poetry more furious than his, no poetry so purely inspired by bitterness. Celan never stopped confronting the dragon of the past, and in the end it swallowed him up.
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    “Todesfugue” (Death Fugue) is not Celan’s best poem, but it is unquestionably his most famous poem — the work that made his reputation. Coming as it did in the late forties, only a few years after the end of the war — and in striking contrast to Adorno’s rather fatuous remark about the “barbarity” of writing poems after Auschwitz — “Todesfugue” had a considerable impact among German readers, both for its direct mention of the concentration camps and for the terrible beauty of its form. The poem is literally a fugue composed of words, and its pounding, rhythmical repetitions and variations mark off a terrain no less circumscribed, no less closed in on itself than a prison surrounded by barbed wire. Covering slightly less than two pages, it begins and ends with the following stanzas:
Black milk of dawn we drink it at dusk
we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night
we drink and drink
we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when it darkens to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps outside and the stars all aglisten
he whistles for his hounds
he whistles for his Jews he has them dig a grave in the earth
he commands us to play for the dance

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Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at dusk and at daybreak we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eye is blue
he shoots you with bullets of lead his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and dreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamite

(trans. by Joachim Neugroschel)

    In spite of the poem’s great control and the formal sublimation of an impossibly emotional theme, “Todesfugue” is one of Celan’s most explicit works. In the sixties, he even turned against it, refusing permission to have it reprinted in more anthologies because he felt that his poetry had progressed to a stage where “Todesfugue” was too obvious and superficially realistic. With this in mind, however, one does discover in this poem elements common to much of Celan’s work: the taut energy of the language, the objectification of private anguish, the unusual distancing effected between feeling and image. As Celan himself expressed it in an early commentary on his poems: “What matters for this language … is precision. It does not transfigure, does not ‘poetize’, it names and composes, it tries to measure out the sphere of the given and the possible.”
    This notion of the possible is central to Celan. It is the way by which one can begin to enter his conception of the poem, his vision of reality. For the seeming paradox of another of his statements — “Reality is not. It must be searched for and won” — can lead to confusion unless one has already understood the aspiration for the real that informs Celan’s poetry. Celan is not advocating a retreat into subjectivity or the construction of an imaginary universe. Rather, he is staking out the distance over which the poem must travel and defining the ambiguity of a world in which all values have been subverted.
Speak—
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,
give it as much
as you know has been dealt out between
midday and midday and midnight.

Look around:
look how it all leaps alive—
where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade. 

(from “Speak, You Also,” trans. by Michael Hamburger)

    In a public address delivered in the city of Bremen in 1958 after being awarded an important literary prize, Celan spoke of language as the one thing that had remained intact for him after the war, even though it had to pass through “the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.” “In this language,” Celan said — and by this he meant German, the language of the Nazis and the language of his poems — “I have tried to write poetry, in order to acquire a perspective of reality for myself.” He then compared the poem to a message in a bottle