LOVE WON'T SAVE US

posts tagged "paul celan"

"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.

"

"Only
the mouths
were saved. Hear us,
o sinking things.
-Paul Celan, from Glottal Stop, trans. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh"

From a letter to Yehuda Amichai from Paul Celan:

   I'm truly ashamed that I can find my way into your
   Hebrew poems only with the aid of English translations.
   But I've a strong impression it's just this, finding my
   way, that affords me what's most poetic. What really
   belongs to you in your poems comes through with the
   most convincing, most conspicuous force. You are the
   poem you write, the poem you write is ... you yourself.

"the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet.
-Paul Celan"

Paul Celan in his speech at Bremen:

One thing remained attainable, close and unlost amidst all the losses: language. Language was not lost, in spite of all that happened. But it had to go through its own responselessness, go through horrible silences, go through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.

"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."

"Poems are narrows: you have to go through here with your life”

          —from Paul Celan

"

Poems are not accumulations and articulations of “word material;” they are the actualizing of something immaterial, language-emanations carried through life-hours, tangible and mortal like us. These hours are, especially in the poem, our hours—this is one of them—; hours have no phenotype; we still write for our life.

-Paul Celan