Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward Zuk
Andrew, I found a link to a pdf version of the Meridian speech in the blog post here.
I don't know Celan's work well, but I read the Poetry link with interest, and I'm also enjoying the discussion here. I like his notion that rhyme is paradoxical in terms of freedom--this seems to me to be truer and more profound than the usual dismissal of rhyme (and metre, or any type of form) as being unfree. |
Yes. And it wasn't just some riff on rhyme. It seems related the discomfort he felt with mitigating the collapse with music. It led him later to no longer allow his famous poem on the camps
Todesfugue from being placed in anthologies. He saw it as Festiner said in his biography as helping students to transcend and surmount was could not be, what should not be surmounted. His follow up to the poem is
Stretto, a term related to the fugue.
A bit of both below (trans. Felstiner and Unknown respectively:
From Death Fugue
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped
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
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
……..he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance
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 we shovel a grave in the air
……..where you won’t lie too cramped
He shouts dig this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing.
From Stretto
*
Taken off into
the terrain
with the unmistakable trace:
Grass, written asunder. The stones, white
with the grassblades' shadows:
Read no more—look!
Look no more—go!
Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are—
are at home. Slowly a wheel
rolls out of itself, the spokes
clamber,
clamber on the blackened field, night
needs no stars, nowhere
are you asked after.
*
Nowhere
are you asked after—
The place where they lay, it has
a name—it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.
Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. Not one
awoke,
sleep
came over them.