Tag: Paul Celan
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microliths 240-241|246 by Paul Celan
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…
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Further excerpts from Paul Celan’s ‘microliths’
16 He who transforms himself wants, being the same, to become someone else. Shape = semblance 17 There is no such thing as the Ibolithic, you say! Well, where would we wind up if we agreed with that? For then the Lithic wouldn’t exist either, the basic Lithic, this idiom worked up with such great…
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‘Sequence after Celan’ by Gillian Prew
Sequence after Celan 1 Spring: trees flying up to their birds where the sun is the seeds are freed their small sound a wound like death watercoloured and open each foliated lung with its breathing understory the climb of springtime into the loud light sky filled with dove-coloured words 2 the climbed evening is thick…
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Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetry in translation by Mary O’Donnell 2.
VERILY For Anna Akhmatova He who has never been rendered speechless, I’m telling you, whoever merely feathers his own nest and with words – is beyond help. Not by the shortcut nor by way of the long. To make a single sentence tenable, to withstand the ding-dong of language. Nobody…
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Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine
Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013. A Publication of the Poetry Foundation Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley) Later, I…
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‘The Headless Bird’ by Ileana Mãlãncioiu
According to custom, the old people have shut me away not to scare me stupid when they killed the bird, and I am listening by the bolted door to the trampling and the struggle. I twist the lock time has worn thin to forget what I have heard, to get away from this struggle where…
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John Felstiner, a translation of ‘Todesfuge’ by Paul Celan
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night/ we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening/ we drink and we drink/ A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes/ he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta/ Your ashen hair Shulamith…
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A link to a VIDA conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield.
“I discovered sexism’s glass walls—which do exist still, to a shocking degree—later rather than earlier. A great blessing, that belatedness. As a young person, I felt the world’s heritage of art and literature was mine to forage.” (Jane Hirshfield) This week’s blog post contains just two small links because family duties had called me away from my…
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David Orr is entitled to question the relevance of modern poetry.
For me, ‘Relevance’ is a dirty word, it kills the creative impulse and grounds poetry is mechanism. I thought to add a link to the ongoing discussion about relevancy in modern poetry centred in a critique (Huff Post) of Beautiful and Pointless, a Guide to Modern Poetry. Dadaists and Surrealists would rightly cut up and rearrange…
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“Chorus of the Rescued” by Nelly Sachs
We, the rescued, From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes, And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow— Our bodies continue to lament With their mutilated music. We, the rescued, The nooses would for our necks still dangle Before us the blue air— Hourglasses still fill with our…
Chris Murray 