Correspondence - Opening

1

Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, poem and dedication in a book of Matisse paintings, Vienna 24(?) June 1948

'In Egypt'

For Ingeborg

Thou shalt say to the strange woman's eye: be the water!

Thou shalt seek in the stranger's eye those whom thou knowest to be in the water.

Thou shalt call them from the water: Ruth! Noemi! Miriam!

Thou shalt adorn them when thou liest with the stranger.

Thou shalt adorn them with the cloud-hair of the stranger.

Thou shalt say to Ruth, to Miriam and Noemi:

Behold, I sleep next to her!

Thou shalt adorn the stranger next to thee most beautifully of all

Thou shalt adorn her with the pain over Ruth, over Miriam and Noemi.

Thous shalt say to the stranger:
Behold, I slept next to these!

Vienna, 23 May 1948

To the meticulous one,

22 years after her birthday,

From the unmeticulous one

Message

Out of the corpse-warm foyer of heaven steps the sun.
There it is not the immortals,
but rather the fallen, we perceive.


And brilliance doesn't trouble itself with decay. Our godhead,
history, has ordered for us a grave
from which there is no resurrection.

Journey Out

[...]
The first wave of night hits the shore,
the second already reaches you.
But if you look hard,
you can still see the tree
which definitely lifts an arm
-- the wind has already knocked one off
-- and you think: how much longer,
how much longer
will the twisted timber withstand the weather?
Of land there's nothing more to be seen.
With your hand you should have dug into the sandbank
or tied yourself to the cliff with a strand of hair.
[...]

Autumn Maneuver

I don't say: ah, yesterday/ With worthless
summer money pocketed, we lie again
on the chaff of scorn, in time's autumn maneuver.
And the escape southward isn't an option for us
as it is for the birds. Across the way, at evening,
trawlers and gondolas pass, and sometimes
a splinter of dream-filled marble pierces me
in the eys, where I am most vulnerable to beauty.


In the papers I read about the cold
and its effects, about fools and dead men,
about refugees, murderers and myriads
of ice floes, but little that comforts me.
Why should it be otherwise? In the face of the beggar
who comes at noon I slam the door, for we live in peacetime
and one can spare oneself such a sight, but not
the joyless dying of leaves in the rain.


Let's take a trip! Let's stroll under cypresses
or even under palms or in the orange groves
to see at reduced rates sunsets
that are beyond compare! Let's forget
the unanswered letters to yesterday!
Time works wonders. But if it arrives inconveniently
with the knocking of guilt: we're not at home.
In the heart's cellar, sleepless, I find myself again
on the chaff of scorn, in time's autumn maneuver.