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Paul Celan: 70 Poems
"Hamburger's starkly graceful selected translations [of Celan]...remain the best available."― Publishers Weekly Paul Celan is the preeminent poet of the Holocaust. His chilling, haunted verse, evocative and agonizingly spare, is among the essential writing of the modern age. Paul 70 Poems is a portable selection of some of his most essential work, translated by Michael Hamburger (1924–2007), who for more than thirty years has provided the English-speaking world with the truest access to Celan’s oeuvre.
96 pages, Paperback
First published April 17, 2013
About the author
Paul Celan
222 books520 followersPoet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 15, 2013
A few months ago, I was reading the poetry of Paul Eluard, a 20th-century French poet whose existence I first learned about from Pablo Neruda's affectionate elegy, "Los Nombres (The Names)":
"I didn't write their names on the roofbeams because they were famous, but because they were my friends.
Rojas Giménez, the nomad, nocturnal, pierced with the grief of farewells, dead with joy, pigeon breeder, madman of the shadows.
Joaquín Cifruntes, whose verses rolled like stones in the river.
Fredrico, who made me laugh like no one else could and who put us all in mourning for a century.
Paul Eluard, whose forget-me-not color eyes are as sky-blue as always and retain their blue strength beneath the earth...
Why did they leave so soon? Their names will not slip down from the rafters. Each one of them was a victory. Together they were the sum of my light. Now, a small anthology of my sorrow."
This is an incredible thing to try to wrap one's mind around: two men from different continents, whose first names are cognates of one another (Paul/Pablo), who built a literary friendship so strong that it inspired one of the tenderest elegies ever written.
Today I finished reading a collection of poetry by yet a third 20th-century poet named Paul: Paul Celan, a Romanian-born Jew who lived for most of his life in France but who wrote predominantly in German. Imagine my surprise when, in the midst of this slim volume, I stumbled upon yet another elegy for Paul Eluard:
"Lay those words into the dead man's grave
which he spoke in order to live.
Pillow his head amid them,
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.
Lay that word on the dead man's eyelids
which he refused to him
who addressed him as thou,
the word
his leaping heart-blood passed by
when a hand as bare as his own
knotted him who addressed him as thou
into the trees of the future.
Lay this word on his eyelids:
perhaps
his eye, still blue, will assume
a second, more alien blueness,
and he who addressed him as thou
will dream with him: We."
The differences between these two elegies are striking, but so are the similarities (e.g., the references in both poems to the enduring blueness of Eluard's eyes). I think these two elegies are a good entry point into Celan's work, because they encapsulate the qualities that all three Pauls have in common: a magnificence, a grandeur, which transcends national boundaries, which transcends even time.
Some of the poems Celan wrote in his early period ("The Years From You to Me," "Corona") are tangibly Neruda-esque, celebrating the elemental and erotic qualities of a heterosexual coupling with simple concrete nouns drawn from the natural world: "we love each other like poppy and recollection,/we sleep like wine in the conches,/like the sea in the moon's blood ray." Later poems engage language in a more idiosyncratic fashion, reflecting Celan's personal experiences as an escapee from a Nazi concentration camp. One of the rewards of reading a chronologically arranged collection like this one is being able to see how Celan used the same autobiographical material in different ways in the early, middle, and late stages of his career: for example, compare how he treated the subject of his mother's murder in an early poem ("Aspen Tree") versus a later poem ("In Front of a Candle"). Or observe how the motif of grave-digging, which first appears in Celan's famous "Death-Fugue," re-arises later in "There Was Earth Inside Them" and "The Straitening."
"I didn't write their names on the roofbeams because they were famous, but because they were my friends.
Rojas Giménez, the nomad, nocturnal, pierced with the grief of farewells, dead with joy, pigeon breeder, madman of the shadows.
Joaquín Cifruntes, whose verses rolled like stones in the river.
Fredrico, who made me laugh like no one else could and who put us all in mourning for a century.
Paul Eluard, whose forget-me-not color eyes are as sky-blue as always and retain their blue strength beneath the earth...
Why did they leave so soon? Their names will not slip down from the rafters. Each one of them was a victory. Together they were the sum of my light. Now, a small anthology of my sorrow."
This is an incredible thing to try to wrap one's mind around: two men from different continents, whose first names are cognates of one another (Paul/Pablo), who built a literary friendship so strong that it inspired one of the tenderest elegies ever written.
Today I finished reading a collection of poetry by yet a third 20th-century poet named Paul: Paul Celan, a Romanian-born Jew who lived for most of his life in France but who wrote predominantly in German. Imagine my surprise when, in the midst of this slim volume, I stumbled upon yet another elegy for Paul Eluard:
"Lay those words into the dead man's grave
which he spoke in order to live.
Pillow his head amid them,
let him feel
the tongues of longing,
the tongs.
Lay that word on the dead man's eyelids
which he refused to him
who addressed him as thou,
the word
his leaping heart-blood passed by
when a hand as bare as his own
knotted him who addressed him as thou
into the trees of the future.
Lay this word on his eyelids:
perhaps
his eye, still blue, will assume
a second, more alien blueness,
and he who addressed him as thou
will dream with him: We."
The differences between these two elegies are striking, but so are the similarities (e.g., the references in both poems to the enduring blueness of Eluard's eyes). I think these two elegies are a good entry point into Celan's work, because they encapsulate the qualities that all three Pauls have in common: a magnificence, a grandeur, which transcends national boundaries, which transcends even time.
Some of the poems Celan wrote in his early period ("The Years From You to Me," "Corona") are tangibly Neruda-esque, celebrating the elemental and erotic qualities of a heterosexual coupling with simple concrete nouns drawn from the natural world: "we love each other like poppy and recollection,/we sleep like wine in the conches,/like the sea in the moon's blood ray." Later poems engage language in a more idiosyncratic fashion, reflecting Celan's personal experiences as an escapee from a Nazi concentration camp. One of the rewards of reading a chronologically arranged collection like this one is being able to see how Celan used the same autobiographical material in different ways in the early, middle, and late stages of his career: for example, compare how he treated the subject of his mother's murder in an early poem ("Aspen Tree") versus a later poem ("In Front of a Candle"). Or observe how the motif of grave-digging, which first appears in Celan's famous "Death-Fugue," re-arises later in "There Was Earth Inside Them" and "The Straitening."
July 7, 2014
I'm an unsophisticated reader of modern poetry, but even I can tell Celan was a phenomenon. I can't actually understand many of the poems, but the language is so brilliant that I still loved reading them. The poems that really touched me were the more intelligible ones about his family.
Aspen Tree
Aspen Tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair was never white.
Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My yellow-haired mother did not come home.
Rain cloud, above the well do you hover?
My quiet mother weeps for everyone.
Round star, you wind the golden loop.
My mother's heart was ripped by lead.
Oaken door, who lifted you off your
hinges? My gentle mother cannot return.
Like some of my ancestors, Celan's parents were Jewish citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, like my great-great-grandmother Judith, spoke German rather than Yiddish. So although the poet (born Paul Antschel in 1920) grew up in Romania, his mother tongue and the language in which he always wrote was German, not Romanian or Yiddish.
The young Celan argued with his parents about going into hiding, but they refused. In anger, he went to spend the night at a friend's. That night, his parents were arrested and deported to a camp where they both died, his father of typhus, his mother shot by the Germans. He was arrested months later and spent two years in a labor camp. After the war he made his way to Vienna and eventually settled in France. There he wrote until the age of 50, when he committed suicide by drowning. All Holocaust survivors seemed to suffer from survivors' guilt, and many committed suicide, but can you even imagine the depth of Celan's feelings under the circumstances?
How could he continue to write in German, the language of his parents' killers? It was also the language of his beloved mother, and his own, though like many Eastern Europeans he was a polyglot, speaking Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian and French. In addition to translating from these languages, he also translated from Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and English into German. Fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel chose to write in French as a protest against the German language, but Celan continued to write in German. "There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German," he wrote.
I wonder if one of the things Celan loved about German was the ease of constructing new compound nouns in it. There are some amazing ones in these 70 poems, such as "slit-arteries," "moon-mirror rock-face," "You-Again," "eye-child," "multi-night," "multi-you," "the impassable-true," "syllable-mole," "the hundred-tongued pseudo-poem," "half-death," "bone-Hebrew," "leap-centuries, leap-seconds, leap-births... leap deaths," and "time-courts."
The selection of 70 poems is made by the translator Michael Hamburger. The poems appear in the order in which they were written. As Jenna Le points out in her excellent review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., the chronological ordering allows you to see different treatments of common themes in the early, middle and late stages of Celan's career.
The most famous poem in the book (and one of the earlier and more accessible) is "Todesfuge" or "Death Fugue," translated thus by Hamburger:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.
He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Here is a much later, much more "fractured" poem (the words "fracture" and "recombine" are often used to describe what Celan does to German:
Largo
You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one
more-than-
death-
sized we lie
together, autumn
crocus, the timeless, teems
under our breathing eyelids,
the pair of blackbirds hangs
beside us, under
our whitely drifting
companions up there, our
meta-
stases.
Here's a very late poem that's almost totally opaque to me, but that I love to read:
Leap-centuries, leap-
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stacked in honeycomb troughs,
"bits
on chips",
the menora poem from Berlin
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
welfare-attended? A-
live?),
reading stations in the late word,
saving flame points
in the sky,
comb lines under fire,
feelings, frost-
mandrelled,
cold start --
with haemoglobin.
"Frost-mandrelled," for crying out loud!
From Merriam-Webster:
man·drel noun \ˈman-drəl\
Definition of MANDREL
1
a : a usually tapered or cylindrical axle, spindle, or arbor inserted into a hole in a piece of work to support it during machining
b : a metal bar that serves as a core around which material (as metal) may be cast, molded, forged, bent, or otherwise shaped
2
: the shaft and bearings on which a tool (as a circular saw) is mounted
Aspen Tree
Aspen Tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair was never white.
Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My yellow-haired mother did not come home.
Rain cloud, above the well do you hover?
My quiet mother weeps for everyone.
Round star, you wind the golden loop.
My mother's heart was ripped by lead.
Oaken door, who lifted you off your
hinges? My gentle mother cannot return.
Like some of my ancestors, Celan's parents were Jewish citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, like my great-great-grandmother Judith, spoke German rather than Yiddish. So although the poet (born Paul Antschel in 1920) grew up in Romania, his mother tongue and the language in which he always wrote was German, not Romanian or Yiddish.
The young Celan argued with his parents about going into hiding, but they refused. In anger, he went to spend the night at a friend's. That night, his parents were arrested and deported to a camp where they both died, his father of typhus, his mother shot by the Germans. He was arrested months later and spent two years in a labor camp. After the war he made his way to Vienna and eventually settled in France. There he wrote until the age of 50, when he committed suicide by drowning. All Holocaust survivors seemed to suffer from survivors' guilt, and many committed suicide, but can you even imagine the depth of Celan's feelings under the circumstances?
How could he continue to write in German, the language of his parents' killers? It was also the language of his beloved mother, and his own, though like many Eastern Europeans he was a polyglot, speaking Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian and French. In addition to translating from these languages, he also translated from Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and English into German. Fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel chose to write in French as a protest against the German language, but Celan continued to write in German. "There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German," he wrote.
I wonder if one of the things Celan loved about German was the ease of constructing new compound nouns in it. There are some amazing ones in these 70 poems, such as "slit-arteries," "moon-mirror rock-face," "You-Again," "eye-child," "multi-night," "multi-you," "the impassable-true," "syllable-mole," "the hundred-tongued pseudo-poem," "half-death," "bone-Hebrew," "leap-centuries, leap-seconds, leap-births... leap deaths," and "time-courts."
The selection of 70 poems is made by the translator Michael Hamburger. The poems appear in the order in which they were written. As Jenna Le points out in her excellent review at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., the chronological ordering allows you to see different treatments of common themes in the early, middle and late stages of Celan's career.
The most famous poem in the book (and one of the earlier and more accessible) is "Todesfuge" or "Death Fugue," translated thus by Hamburger:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined.
He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play on for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink you and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on to us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
Here is a much later, much more "fractured" poem (the words "fracture" and "recombine" are often used to describe what Celan does to German:
Largo
You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one
more-than-
death-
sized we lie
together, autumn
crocus, the timeless, teems
under our breathing eyelids,
the pair of blackbirds hangs
beside us, under
our whitely drifting
companions up there, our
meta-
stases.
Here's a very late poem that's almost totally opaque to me, but that I love to read:
Leap-centuries, leap-
seconds, leap-
births, novembering, leap-
deaths,
stacked in honeycomb troughs,
"bits
on chips",
the menora poem from Berlin
(Unasylumed, un-
archived, un-
welfare-attended? A-
live?),
reading stations in the late word,
saving flame points
in the sky,
comb lines under fire,
feelings, frost-
mandrelled,
cold start --
with haemoglobin.
"Frost-mandrelled," for crying out loud!
From Merriam-Webster:
man·drel noun \ˈman-drəl\
Definition of MANDREL
1
a : a usually tapered or cylindrical axle, spindle, or arbor inserted into a hole in a piece of work to support it during machining
b : a metal bar that serves as a core around which material (as metal) may be cast, molded, forged, bent, or otherwise shaped
2
: the shaft and bearings on which a tool (as a circular saw) is mounted
September 26, 2013
How do I write about Celan?
When I read him, it feels so alien; more than language chopped and screwed, this is language detourned from the inside out, like a horror movie victim all puddles of organs on the outside and a face that is no longer recognizable as anything but a mash of flesh. It's like someone hammering on language with some hell-spawn screw. Metaphor doesn't cut it. In fact, Celan doesn't use metaphor or simile. Things just are. Eyes become snow becomes tables becomes witness. Words are compound and fractured, "leap-birthed," "unasylumed," "frost mandrelled." Language does weird things; bubblegum distended, new meanings and fissures... And the repetition. Like Bachmann, the repetition gets under the skin, is insane.
But despite his difficulty, his poems have power. They're not clear, but as a friend said, later in the day suddenly I'll be depressed and I won't know why and I'll realize: "Damn that Celan!"
Amazing. And unfair to all other poets that I will read in the near future. I should probably just stick to Celan for awhile.
A random example:
When I read him, it feels so alien; more than language chopped and screwed, this is language detourned from the inside out, like a horror movie victim all puddles of organs on the outside and a face that is no longer recognizable as anything but a mash of flesh. It's like someone hammering on language with some hell-spawn screw. Metaphor doesn't cut it. In fact, Celan doesn't use metaphor or simile. Things just are. Eyes become snow becomes tables becomes witness. Words are compound and fractured, "leap-birthed," "unasylumed," "frost mandrelled." Language does weird things; bubblegum distended, new meanings and fissures... And the repetition. Like Bachmann, the repetition gets under the skin, is insane.
But despite his difficulty, his poems have power. They're not clear, but as a friend said, later in the day suddenly I'll be depressed and I won't know why and I'll realize: "Damn that Celan!"
Amazing. And unfair to all other poets that I will read in the near future. I should probably just stick to Celan for awhile.
A random example:
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language.
They dug.
There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.
O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?
O you dig and I dig and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.
June 6, 2019
Difficult tricky intense poems. Glad he didn’t listen to Adorno about poems after a certain time.
January 26, 2021
A New Yorker reviewer writes of having a 'mystical experience' while reading Celan. Somewhere else his poetry is described as 'esoteric.' I remember a Poetry Text from a How to Read Poetry class I must have taken 30 years ago said that into every poem you read is also written everything you have already read. It probably said this some other way - the meaning to me has always been, that the poet, whatever he meant at the time of writing or what he or she thought was being conveyed will always be interpreted by the reader through all of their experiences and readings prior. In the case of my reading Celan, I haven't read or experienced enough.
I have to admit the meaning of his poetry is deeply hidden and out of my present reach. Further it is very much a mystical experience at times as his work weighs heavily of the Holocaust and seems to span different dimensions of life and death. I found myself wanting to enjoy and understand these poems at a level I could not. I give it a 4 star rating because I need to go back. I need to fill in some gaps. I will come back to this poet some day when I am more prepared.
I have to admit the meaning of his poetry is deeply hidden and out of my present reach. Further it is very much a mystical experience at times as his work weighs heavily of the Holocaust and seems to span different dimensions of life and death. I found myself wanting to enjoy and understand these poems at a level I could not. I give it a 4 star rating because I need to go back. I need to fill in some gaps. I will come back to this poet some day when I am more prepared.
November 9, 2023
Haunting - you will never forget these lines - drifting like smoke into a heaven that is the only way to escape the hell men make for each other. I had to put this book down several times; the combination of the poems and what was happening on the news made me have to just go outside and watch the sun set. Powerful and transformative - highest recommendation.
January 10, 2018
My favourite poet.
November 8, 2018
I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about Assisi. 4.5 stars for that one poem alone.
April 12, 2021
Translated from German
January 29, 2023
a strange lostness was
palpably present, almost
you would
have lived
palpably present, almost
you would
have lived
July 8, 2013
I read Paul Celan before and remember especially his book, "Last Poems" as being quite goo.d But these poems did not grab my attention as easily. They did not seem to have the depth of his other work.
March 14, 2015
The Silent One told me to read Paul Celan's poetry. I love it, enough to ignore the very rare bits of extraterrestrial English. I imagine translating it wasn't easy.
July 25, 2016
Celan makes the right words elusive, like ghosts, even as you stare at them directly on the page.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews