Quotes
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Autunm eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. In the mirror it's Sunday, in dream there is room for sleeping, our mouths speak the truth. My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one: we look at each other, we exchange dark words, we love each other like poppy and recollection, we sleep like wine in the conches, like the sea in the moon's blood ray. We stand by the window embracing, and people look up...
Paul Celan
With a changing key,
you unlock the house where
the snow of what’s silenced drifts.
Just like the blood that bursts from
Your eye or mouth or ear,
so your key changes.
Changing your key changes the word
That may drift with flakes.
Just like the wind that rebuffs you,
Clenched round your word is the snow.
Paul Celan
Count up the almonds,
Count what was bitter and kept you waking,
Count me in too:
I sought your eye when you glanced up and no one would see you,
I spun that secret thread
Where the dew you mused on
Slid down to pitchers
Tended by a word that reached no one’s heart.
There you first fully entered the name that is yours,
you stepped to yourself on steady feet,
the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,
things overheard thrust through to you,
what’s dead put it’s arm around you...
Paul Celan
Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.
Speak-
But don’t split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.
Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.
Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.
But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer:...
Paul Celan
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
Paul Celan
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