But the core idea of the darkness ( Dunkelheit) of poetry wasn’t really developed in the Büchner Prize address, better known under its title, The Meridian. This necessitated a speech, and several of the assembled thoughts and formulations for the lecture were adapted into what became his most important statement on his poetics and on his life as a poet. It is often assumed that this amounted to a dismantling of German, a way of writing it that worked against its natural proclivities and patterns, but in fact it is at least as accurate to say that Celan worked with and in German, revealing expressive seams and veins that had hitherto lain neglected.Īround 1960 Paul Celan began making notes for a lecture on the “darkness or obscurity of the poetic,” which was soon superseded by his being awarded the 1960 Büchner Prize, Germany’s main literary award, which he accepted.

In the postwar years until his suicide in 1970, he extended conceptions of what poetry could be and do, drawing radical conclusions as to what it meant to continue the tradition of the German lyric even though he was using the language of those who had murdered his mother and father and attempted to eradicate his people entirely.

He has long represented a kind of absolute of what poetry is capable of, and stands as an exemplary ﬁgure for other poets, many of whom have incorporated aspects of his work into their own. At the base, footsteps crunch along a barren landscape, fluttering book pages and fluttering sheets rise to the ceiling, where the “light-tones” accumulate the latter a combination of footsteps convolved with ringing housekeys, and tones produced by a strange electronic brush, which I used to trace a photo of bare tree branches.If the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan were a compass point, he would be north. The sound composition is an almost literal enactment of the poem. Translation by Pierre Joris)īlue - sky, orange - sun, concrete - wasteland the symbology is direct, unambiguous and when colored with the light of the sound it develops a kind of sublimity. It is from Celan’s later period and expresses unusual hope: In another exploration of the vertical soundfield, Fadensonnen (Threadsuns) is a direct expression of the Paul Celan poem of the same name. Fiberglass, wood, concrete, loudspeakers, 8 channel audio.

Fadensonnen paul celan