Celan, Paul

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

  1. In the shape of a boar
  2. your dream tramples through the woods on the edges of evening.
  3. Glittering white
  4. like the ice from which it erupted
  5. are its razors.
  6.  
  7. It rakes up a bitter nut
  8. from under the leaves
  9. that its shadow tore from the trees,
  10. a nut
  11. black as the heart that your foot kicked along
  12. when you walked here yourself.
  13.  
  14. It gores the nut
  15. and fills the thicket with grunting fate,
  16. then strikes off
  17. down towards the coast,
  18. there where the sea
  19. holds its darkest of feasts
  20. on the crags:
  21.  
  22. perhaps
  23. a fruit like its own
  24. will delight the festive eye
  25. that has wept such stones.

original German:

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

  1. In Gestalt eines Ebers
  2. stampft dein Traum durch die Walder am Rande des Abends.
  3. Blitzendweiss
  4. wie das Eis, aus dem er hervorbrach,
  5. sind seine Hauer.
  6.  
  7. Eine bittere Nuss
  8. wiihlt er hervor unterm Laub,
  9. das sein Schatten den Baurnen entriss,
  10. eine Nuss,
  11. schwarz wie das Herz, das dein Fuss vor sich herstiess,
  12. als du selber hier schrittst.
  13.  
  14. Er spiesst sie auf
  15. und erfiillt das Geholz mit grunzendem Schicksal,
  16. dann treibts ihn
  17. hinunter zur Kiiste,
  18. dorthin, wo das Meer
  19. seiner Feste finsterstes gibt
  20. auf den Klippen:
  21.  
  22. vielleicht
  23. dass eine Frucht wie die seine
  24. das feiernde Auge entziickt,
  25. das solche Steine geweint hat.

 Paul Celen. Speech-Grille and Selected Poems, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. (1971).

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]

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