Poems by Paul Celan
Translated by Michael Hamburger. PN Review 43, May - June 1985.
I HAVE CUT BAMBOO:
for you, my son.
I have lived.
This hut to
be dismantled tomorrow, it
stands.
I did not join in the building: you
don't know in what kind
of vessels I put
the sand from around me, years ago, thus
commanded and bidden. Yours
comes from the open places — it stays
open.
The reed that takes root here, tomorrow
still it will stand, wherever
in the unbound your soul may
play you.
IN ONE
Thirteenth of February. Shibboleth
roused in the heart's mouth. With you,
peuple
de Paris. No pasarán.
Little sheep to the left: he, Abadias,
the old man from Huesca, came with his dogs
over the field, in exile
white hung a cloud
of human nobility, into our hands
he spoke the word that we needed, it was
shepherd-Spanish, and in it
in icelight of the cruiser 'Aurora':
the brotherly hand, waving with
the blindfold removed from
his word-wide eyes — Petropolis, the
roving city of those unforgotten,
was Tuscanly close to your heart also.
Peace to the cottages!
LES GLOBES
In the eyes all awry — read there:
the sun, the heart orbits, the
whizzing, lovely In Vain.
The deaths and all that
to which they gave birth. The
chain of generations
that lies buried here and
hangs here still, in the aether,
and borders abysses. All the script
of those faces into which
whirring word-sand drilled itself — tiny eternities,
syllables.
All things,
even the heaviest, were
fledged, nothing
held back.
SEWN UNDER THE SKIN of my hands:
your name
that hands comforted.
When I knead the
lump of air, our nourishment,
it is soured by
the letter effulgence from
the dementedly open
pore.
BLACK
as memory's wound
the eyes root for you
in this plot bitten
bright by the heart-teeth,
crownland that remains our bed:
through this shaft you must come —
you come.
In the seminal
sense
the sea stars you out, inmostly, for ever.
There's an end to the giving of names,
over you I cast my fate.
LANDSCAPE with urn creatures.
Conversations
from smoke mouth to smoke mouth.
They eat:
those madhouse truffles, a chunk
of unburied poetry,
found a tongue and a tooth.
A tear rolls back into its eye.
The left-hand, orphaned
half of the pilgrim's
shell — they gave it to you,
then they fettered you —
listening, floodlights the scene:
the clinker game against death
can begin.
WHEN YOU LIE in
the bed of lost flag cloth,
with blue-black syllables, in snow eyelash shade,
through thought-
showers
the crane comes gliding, steely —
you open to him.
His bill ticks the hour for you
into every mouth — in each hour
with a red-hot rope, bell-rings a
millennium of silence,
unrespite and respite
mint each other to death,
the florins, the pennies
rain hard through your pores,
in
the shape of seconds
you fly there and bar
the doors yesterday and tomorrow, — phosphorescent,
like eternity teeth,
your one breast buds, and the other
breast buds too,
towards the graspings, under
the thrusts —: so densely,
so deeply
strewn
is the starry
crane-
seed.
THAT WHICH WAS WRITTEN grows hollow, that
which was spoken, sea-green,
burns in the coves,
in the
liquidized names
the porpoises leap,
in the eternalized Nowhere, here,
in recollection of the too-
loud bells in — but where?,
who
in this
shadow square
snorts, who
beneath it
shines out, shines out, shines out?
CELLO ENTRY
from behind pain:
the powers, graded
towards counter-heavens,
roll out indecipherable things
in front of arrival runway and drive,
the
climbed evening
is thick with lung-scrub,
two
smoke-clouds of breath
dig in the book
which the temple-din opened,
something grows true,
twelve times the
beyond hit by arrows lights up,
the black-
blooded woman drinks
the black-blooded man's semen,
all things are less than
they are,
all are more.
VAST, GLOWING VAULT
with the swarm of
black stars pushing them-
selves out and away:
on to a ram's silicified forehead
I brand this image, between
the horns, in which,
in the song of the whorls, the
marrow of melted
heart-oceans swells.
In-
to what
does he not charge?
The world is gone, I must carry you.
These translations are taken from PN Review 43, May - June 1985. More are available in the issue, accessible to paying subscribers. Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.
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