Excerpts from microliths by Paul Celan
translated by Pierre Joris
____________
[These are Celan’s first notes toward the conference project
“On the Darkness of Poetry” which remained unfinished.]
Pjoris
240
240.1
|| Mysticism as wordlessness
Poetry as form
241.2 The poem is inscribed as the figure of the whole language,
but language remains invisible; what is actualizing itself —
language — steps, as soon as it has happened, back into the realm of
the possible.“Le poème,” writes Valéry, “est du langage à l’état
naissant;” /“Poetry,” writes Valéry, “is language in the state
of being born;”/ Language in statu nascendi, thus, language freeing
itself.
241
241.1 Yesyes, not only the Geiger-, the “syllable-counters ” too,
though despised by a literature that calls itself engaged,
register something.
————————————
↑
→ 241.2
aesthesis is not enough; the … ;noesis is not enough; …
; what’s needed is personal presence,
what’s needed is conversation;
conversation and entertainment are different things; conversations
are demanding, straining.
241.3 ——–——–
Idea of the bracket (voicedness)
syncope
also the this vibrato of the words has se-
mantic relevance
241.4 ______
The poet: always in partibus infidelium
241.5 ______
Das Kampaner Tal, p. 51, footnote:
↓
||... “as on the Jews’ houses (in memory of ruined Jerusalem),
something always has to be left unfinished.”
to remember in the poem — remembrance as absence —
241.6 Language planes
||
Nationallibr.: Bühler —
241.7
______
No syllogistic enriched with this or that theory of association, no
logistic will ever be able to do justice to the fact of “poem” — the
alleged thought- or language-scheme of the poem is never “finished.”
______
241.8
syntactic (and other!) bracketings
______
241.9
Oppositeness?
______
241.10
Multivocity
______
241.11
139. Psalm: nox illuminatio mea
... darkness is like the light
246
246.1 an uneasiness similar to that in
“Lyrik-Dichtung) relation to the word
→ “Schrifttum / literature”
The uneasiness Lyrik (which Heine
the progress therein uses…)
Tension between Lyrik = Dichtung
Questions Lyric Poetry
“Problems of Poetry”
246.2 We live in a brightly lit time, a time that illustrates
everything; lyric poetry has a cosmopolitan trait: “Felice notte!”
our so beneficially contradictory god poetizes. Benn…
246.3 _______
The secret marriage the word contracts in the poem with the real and
the true is called “wild” mainly by those who do not want to forgo
their lushly comfortable, well-guarded culture-harem and — especially
— the eunuchal services that come with it.
(Poetry certainly does not threaten this seraglio with any kind of
abduction)
246.3 The — oh so wordily lamented — loss of tradition: the
legitimism of those who “legitimize” themselves everywhere,
so as not to have to justify themselves to themselves.
| Excerpts from Paul Celan’s microliths (I)
162.1
It is part of poetry’s essential features that it releases the poet, its crown witness and confidant, from their shared knowledge once it has taken on form. (If it were different, there would barely be a poet who could take on the responsibility of having written more than one poem.) 162.2 —Poetry as event § Read at Excerpts from Paul Celan’s microliths Further excerpts from Paul Celan’s microliths (II)22 Hermeticism— Certain “citizens” and the poem: They buy the surprise bag; one knows vaguely what’s in it, it won’t be much, but then it doesn’t cost much either, and if one happens to visit the fair and one has enjoyed the lady without lower- but with upper body, one’s amusement also demands this. And when what’s in it turns out — but here too the buyer’s superior humor can prove itself — to be even cheaper than cheap, there still remains the fun that all of that was “too. |
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Chris Murray 