PETER FILKINS
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more intrigued by the pathos inherent to his own inability to ever quite
set down what was, while at the same time finding himself transformed
and closer to the unutterable as a result of his failure. Ambivalence, then,
becomes as much a credo as it does a final destination.
In
another early
poem, Celan refers directly to such a need when in the first two stanzas
of "Speak, You Also" he writes:
Speak, you also,
speak as the last.
have your say
speak -
But keep yes and no unsplit.
And give your say this meaning:
give it the shade.
Functioning almost like a manifesto for Celan's later work, the
poem goes on to state, "He speaks truly who speaks the shade." Celan,
however, is never one given to narrow polemicism, for his concern with
speaking "the shade" demands by its very nature a confluence of plurals
and dualities. Thus, as
if
the only way out were through, the poem's last
stanza finds Celan moving from the shade to the light:
But now shrinks the place where you stand:
Where now, stripped by shade, will you go:>
Upward. Grope your way up.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to
float farther down, down below
where it sees itself gleam: in the swell
of wandering words.
It
is precisely Celan's own ambivalence towards "wandering words"
and their ability to seize hold of experience that marks his true note as a
poet. Deeply influenced by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (despite
his own horror and disgust with Heidegger's Nazi sympathies), Celan
found language to be both limitation and sustenance in his effort to
capture despair. Because of the ability of German to combine words into
new words, Celan had the opportunity to turn language upon its head.
The result was that, through the deft use of Yiddish and Hebrew sources
as well as the creation of new words that pointed to their own telling
roots, the language he created for his poems worked to free him from
