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and nuclear wastelands, and reaching beyond Celan’s own dates through that fin de siècle into the mauled dawn of the twenty-first century. Today, nearly fifty years after the composition of these poems, their readability has opened up, making the very difficulties they present not a stumbling block but a gate to anyone attentive to the times and the words. This gate may be narrow; indeed, it needs to be narrow—it is an Engführung , a “straightening,” a “leading into the narrows,” as Celan calls an earlier poem that rewrites the “Todesfuge”—if only as an index to the irreducible complexity of the age and to the effort needed to crack—“à la pointe acérée” (with the sharpened tip) of pen and thought—the husk humanity frantically consolidates, thickening around the kernel of whatever truth there may be. And Celan believed in being, in working, at all costs, in a realm where clarity was law.
    Celan insisted, and rightly so, I believe, on the fact that his poetry was directly linked to, and arose from, the real. This insistence is important to keep in mind today, here in the United States, even though it was first formulated in the narrower focus of an answer to the early German critics who wanted to dismiss the work as just “surreal,” that is, as imaginary/fictive imagery, or, even worse, as psychotic ravings, and did so in order to cover up their own inability and actual refusal to acknowledge the lethal reality (and German responsibility for it) from which Celan wrote himself into the present. 24 This is shared reality—thus not only Celan’s landscape but ours too, even if we are often unwilling to acknowledge the starkness and the darkness of the place in which we live. For indeed, we no longer live, as the plural of the poem’s title immediately makes clear, under the cozy reassurance of a world held in place, centered around a or the sun, our sun, Helios, as it was called under an older dispensation. We have had to acknowledge, at least at the macrocosmic level, the fiction of the one star from which we have been able metaphorically to derive the (to us) reassuring though fictitious conditions of a single belonging, a single origin, a single fate—a realization that traverses Celan’s work: In a poem from the 1963 volume, Die Niemandsrose , there is “eine Sonne”—a, one, one could nearly say “some,” sun—that comes along “swimming.” The prose récit “Conversation in the Mountains” opens with the sentence “Eines Abends, die Sonne, und nicht nur sie, war untergegangen” (One evening, the sun, and not only the sun, had set), where “untergegangen” (to set), especially because the sun is accompanied in this action by something else (“and not only the sun”), also clearly carries its further meanings of “to perish,” “to disappear,” “to sink,” “to founder,” “to drown,” etc. Ezra Pound lamented in the Cantos that “the center does not hold”—Celan knows that this is so because there is no single center, no single sun that can hold it all up, that, in fact, there has always been only a decentered multiplicity of centers.
    But not only have the centers multiplied (or maybe because of that), the shape of our certainties has also altered radically. That most reassuring of shapes, the circle, the sphere, the form of perfection, the unalterable, unbreachable, unanswerable form of the truth, which we had derived from the single sun as source of our world, that form too has, under the pressure of the multiple and the many, been changed, has ex- or imploded: these suns are threads now, thin, elongated—lines of flight. And there is doubt how much light, if any, such suns may shed—clearly the scape beneath or against which these suns appear is barren, desert, a wilderness— eremiai