Romania / France, (1920-1970)
In the Shape of a Boar
“I’ve asked myself where I might have got my boar from.”
— Paul Celan in a letter to the classicist Walter Jens in May 1961
- In the shape of a boar
- your dream tramples through the woods on the edges of evening.
- Glittering white
- like the ice from which it erupted
- are its razors.
- It rakes up a bitter nut
- from under the leaves
- that its shadow tore from the trees,
- a nut
- black as the heart that your foot kicked along
- when you walked here yourself.
- It gores the nut
- and fills the thicket with grunting fate,
- then strikes off
- down towards the coast,
- there where the sea
- holds its darkest of feasts
- on the crags:
- perhaps
- a fruit like its own
- will delight the festive eye
- that has wept such stones.
In Gestalt emes Ebers
“Ich habe mich also gefragt, wo ich meinen Eber herhaben mag.”
— Paul Celan in einem Brief an den Altphilologen Walter Jens im Mai 1961
- In Gestalt eines Ebers
- stampft dein Traum durch die Walder am Rande des Abends.
- Blitzendweiss
- wie das Eis, aus dem er hervorbrach,
- sind seine Hauer.
- Eine bittere Nuss
- wiihlt er hervor unterm Laub,
- das sein Schatten den Baurnen entriss,
- eine Nuss,
- schwarz wie das Herz, das dein Fuss vor sich herstiess,
- als du selber hier schrittst.
- Er spiesst sie auf
- und erfiillt das Geholz mit grunzendem Schicksal,
- dann treibts ihn
- hinunter zur Kiiste,
- dorthin, wo das Meer
- seiner Feste finsterstes gibt
- auf den Klippen:
- vielleicht
- dass eine Frucht wie die seine
- das feiernde Auge entziickt,
- das solche Steine geweint hat.
About the Poet:
Paul Celan, Romania / France, (1920-1970), was a German-language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family and adopted the pseudonym “Paul Celan” after surviving the war in a forced-labor camp.
Romanian-born, Celan moved to France in 1947. During the next twenty years he published seven volumes of poems in German, garnering a number of important awards. He became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris, working as a teacher of German at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Celan also translated numerous foreign poets, including Mandelshtamm, Ungaretti, Du Bouchet, and Shakespeare. He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. [DES-01/22]