Collected Prose

Zeit-
lose wimmelt
dir unter den atmenden Lidern,
Das Amselpaar hängt
neben uns, unter
unsern gemeinsam droben mit-
ziehenden weissen

Meta-
stasen.

    In the first line, heidegängerisch is an inescapable allusion to Heidegger — whose thinking was in many ways close to Celan’s, but who, as a pro-Nazi, stood on the side of the murderers. Celan visited Heidegger in the sixties, and although it is not known what they said to each other, one can assume that they discussed Heidegger’s position during the war. The reference to Heidegger in the poem is underscored by the use of some of the central words from his philosophical writings: Nahe , Zeit , etc. This is Celan’s way: he does not mention anything directly, but weaves his meanings into the fabric of the language, creating a space for the invisible, in the same way that thought accompanies us as we move through a landscape.
    Further along, in the third stanza, there are the two blackbirds (stock figures in fairy tales, who speak in riddles and bring bad tidings). In the German one reads Amsel — which echoes the sound of Celan’s own name, Anczel. At the same time, there is an evocation of Günter Grass’s novel, Dog Years , which chronicles the love-hate relationship between a Jew and a Nazi during the war. The Jewish character in the story is named Amsel, and throughout the book — to quote George Steiner again — “there is a deadly pastiche of the metaphysical jargon of Heidegger.”
    Toward the end of the poem, the presence of “our whitely drifting / companions up there” is a reference to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust: the smoke of the bodies burned in crematoria. From early poems such as “Todesfugue” (“he gives us a grave in the air”) to later poems such as “Largo,” the Jewish dead in Celan’s work inhabit the air, are the very substance we are condemned to breathe: souls turned into smoke, into dust, into nothing at all — “our / meta- / stases.”
    Celan’s preoccupation with the Holocaust goes beyond mere history, however. It is the primal moment, the first cause and last effect of an entire cosmology. Celan is essentially a religious poet, and although he speaks with the voice of one forsaken by God, he never abandons the struggle to make sense of what has no sense, to come to grips with his own Jewishness. Negation, blasphemy, and irony take the place of devotion; the forms of righteousness are mimicked; Biblical phrases are turned around, subverted, made to speak against themselves. But in so doing, Celan draws nearer to the source of his despair, the absence that lives in the heart of all things. Much has been said about Celan’s “negative theology.” It is most fully expressed in the opening stanzas of “Psalm”:
No One kneads us anew from earth and clay,
no one addresses our dust.
No One.

Laudeamus te, No One.
For your sake would we
bloom forth:
unto
You.

Nothing
were we, and are we and
will be, all abloom:
this Nothing’s, this
no-man’s-rose.
(trans. by Katharine Washburn)

    In the last decade of his life, Celan gradually refined his work to a point where he began to enter new and uncharted territory. The long lines and ample breath of the early poems give way to an elliptical, almost panting style in which words are broken up into their component syllables, unorthodox word-clusters are invented, and the reductionist natural vocabulary of the first books is inundated by references to science, technology, and political events. These short, usually untitled poems move along by lightning-quick flashes of intuition, and their message, as Michael Hamburger aptly puts it, “is at once more urgent and more reticent.” One feels both a shrinking and an expansion in them, as if, by traveling to the inmost recesses of himself, Celan had somehow vanished, joining with the greater forces beyond him — and at the same time sinking more deeply into his isolation.
Thread-suns
over the gray-black wasteland.
A treehigh
thought
strikes the note of light: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

(trans. by Joachim Neugroschel)

    In poems such as this one, Celan has set the stakes so high that he must surpass himself in order to keep even with himself — and push his life into the void in order to cling to his identity. It is an impossible struggle, doomed from the start to disaster. For poetry cannot save the soul or retrieve a lost world. It simply asserts the given. In the end, it seems, Celan’s desolation