by Paul Celan
Put the words in the dead man’s grave,
the words he spoke in order to live.
Cradle his head among them
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.
Put the word on the dead man’s eyelid,
the word he refused to speak
to the one who said “thou” to him,
the word
his heart’s blood rushed past
when a hand bare as his own
knotted the one who said “thou” to him
into the trees of the future.
Put that word on his eyelid:
maybe
his eye, still blue,
takes on a second, stranger blue,
a second blue,
and the one who said “thou” to him
dreams with him: we.
Translated from the German by David Young
PAUL CELAN (1920-1970) was a major twentieth-century German-language poet. He was born in Cernăuți, Romania, to a German-speaking Jewish family. During World War II, Celan was imprisoned in a forced labor camp for 18 months. His parents perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Celan moved to Paris in 1948 and became a French citizen in 1955. His poetry rose to prominence with the publication of his second collection, Poppy and Memory (1952). Celan worked in the German language throughout his life, and his complex and estranged relationship with the language of his family and those who murdered them resulted in a transformation of the language within his poetics. He committed suicide in April 1970.