Poems of Paul Celan

Below

Led home into oblivion
the sociable talk of
our slow eyes.

Led home, syllable after syllable, shared
out among the dayblind dice, for which
the playing hand reaches out, large,
awakening.

And the too much of my speaking:
heaped up round the little
crystal dressed in the style of your silence.

Brief comments:
Paul Celan’s work confront us with difficulty and paradox.
Paul Celan spent his formative years in a Jewish community in the frontier of the Austrian Empire.
In the summer of 1942 his parent were deported to an internment camp in Transnistria, where his father died of typhus and his mother was murdered later by a shot in the neck.
After his marriage in 1952 to Gisele Lestrange, Paris remained his home until his suicide by drowning in the Seine in April 1970.

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