![]() ![]() Perhaps for this reason, it has been singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of Celan’s work in quasi-religious terms. ![]() The last line echoes Genesis: “Let there be light.” As I repeated the poem, I suddenly understood it-more, I felt it-as a vision of a second Creation, a coming of the Messiah, when those who have been annihilated (the original is vernichtet, exterminated) might be reborn, through the cleansing of the world.įrom his iconic “Deathfugue,” one of the first poems published about the Nazi camps and now recognized as a benchmark of twentieth-century European poetry, to cryptic later works such as the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. In German, it’s ichten, which doesn’t look any more natural than the English but shows that we’re dealing with a verb in the past tense, constructed from ich, the first-person-singular pronoun-something like “they became I’s,” that is, selves. I felt “him,” that presence, whoever he might be, “unseen” and yet “real.” The poem features one of Celan’s signature neologisms. It was as if the poem opened up and I entered into it. In a dream state or trance, I read the lines over and over, instilling them permanently in my memory. ![]() Once, I heard him, he was washing the world, unseen, nightlong, real. ![]()
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