by Paul Celan
You too speak:
you speak last,
say your word.
Speak–
but never split No off from Yes.
Give your word a meaning:
give it the shade.
Give it enough shade,
give it as much shade
as you know is parceled around you
between midnight and noon and midnight.
Look around:
how everything comes alive–
In the presence of death! Alive!
whoever speaks shade speaks truth.
Now, though, the shade where you stand is shrinking:
Where now, shade-stripped?
Upward. Grope your way up.
You grow thinner, less perceptible, finer.
Finer: a thread
a star would like to slide down on:
to be able to swim down there
where it observes itself glimmering: in the flow
of drifting words.
Translated 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.