Breathturn into Timestead Read Online Free PDF

Zion), though the place it opens out from and which grounds it—“the aortic arch” of the “coronary arteries”—clearly links it to the biological/anatomical topos of “Line the wordcaves.” More could be said of this poem and its topoi, but let’s return briefly to the first poem and close this excursus by presenting another, additive reading of some of the complexities of “Line the wordcaves.” In a brilliant essay, Werner Hamacher discusses the movement of the figure of inversion as central to the poetics of late Celan, using a poem from Speechgrille , “Stimmen,” and concentrating on the line “sirrt die Sekunde” (the second buzzes) where he de- and reconstructs the expression “die Sekunde” (the second) as “diese Kunde” (this message, this conduit of information). In a footnote he includes a brief analysis of “Line the wordcaves,” which I will cite and let stand as conclusion to my own analysis, if only to show how the polyperspectivity of a Celan poem permits multiple approaches, all of which help to shed light on the wordcaves these late poems are. Having also picked up on the sound pun of antre , and the transference of the animal’s outer layer into the word’s inside, Hamacher writes:
    Here too we have an inversion of familiar ideas … Sense is only one—and indeed an alien, second—skin, an inner mask. Tone, as “that which is always second,” is in each case distanced further than the audible tone, infinitely secondary; it too a second . Celan’s later poems are written out of this second and for its sake; they are dated , as finite language, on the second. The inversion of the secondary into the “primary,” of the outer into the “inner,” is always effected in them so that they expand the character of the secondary, in fine , instead of domesticating it. Thus, as he himself stressed, we can only “understand” his texts “from a distance.”
    In addition, auskleiden is one of the possible meanings of auslegen (to interpret). Insofar as the poem takes on this—second—sense in the image, in the clothing, in the pelt, it itself practices the hermeneutic operation it recommends: the whole becomes feline, fellhin und fellher , although not without falling into what would count as failure for a normative understanding. 23
    For Hamacher, the tropes and images of Celan’s poetry are thus “not metaphors for representations but metaphors for metaphorization, not images of a world but images of the generation of images, not the transcription of voices but the production of the etched voices of the poem itself.”
    4. “… ABOVE THE GRAYBLACK WASTES”
    Breathturn , which so forcefully marks the entrance into the late work, includes a poem titled “Fadensonnen” | “Threadsuns.” Celan will reuse this title to name his next volume of poems. It should therefore prove useful to read the poem closely as it may not only help with clarifying some of Celan’s poetological thinking but also throw light beyond that on his philosophical outlook—if these two can, in fact, be separated.
    F ADENSONNEN
    Ã¼ber der grauschwarzen Ödnis.
    Ein baum-
    hoher Gedanke
    greift sich den Lichtton: es sind
    noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
    der Menschen.
    T HREADSUNS
    above the grayblack wastes.
    A tree-
    high thought
    grasps the light-tone: there are
    still songs to sing beyond
    mankind.
    A desolate landscape, truly “north of the future,” as Celan writes in another poem. But also one that lets us formulate exactly where and how the late poetry of Paul Celan settles—even as it unsettles. Neither utopia nor dystopia, Celan’s topos is a visionary-realistic land- and language-scape mapping the second half of the twentieth century, from the devastating aporia constituted by World War II, with its extermination camps