posts tagged "ingeborg bachmann"

"You have often accused me of not forming any relationship with your poems. Please, I ask you to abandon this notion – and I say that not because of this poem alone, but also for the others. Sometimes I live and breathe only through them.”

Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, Vienna, 10 November-16 December 1957, in Correspondence.

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"I do not know if you can sense that I have no one but you to strengthen my faith in the ‘other’, that my thoughts always search for you – not simply as the dearest person I have, but also as the one who, no less lost than I, holds the fort in which we have holed ourselves up.”
-Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, Vienna, 10 November-16 December 1957, in “Correspondence."

A Kind of Loss by Ingeborg Bachmann

Shared: seasons, books, and music.

Keys, teacups, the breadbasket, linens and a bed.

A dowry of words, of gestures, carried along,

used up, spent.

House rules followed. Said. Done. And always

the extended hand.

In winter, in a Viennese septet, and in summer

I have been in love.

With maps, in a mountain hut, on a beach

and in a bed.

A cult made up of dates and irrevocable promises,

enraptured before something, reverent over nothing.

( — to the folded newspaper, the cold ashes, the note

on a piece of paper)

fearless in religion, for the church was this bed.

From the sea view came my unstoppable painting.

From my balcony I greeted the people, my neighbors, below.

By the open fire, in safety, my hair took on its deepest color.

The doorbell’s ring was the alarm for my joy.

It is not you I have lost,

but the world.