Updated: 9/17/09; 12:58:29 AM.
'if' ...
What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not. - Cormac McCarthy
        

>

Thursday, May 29, 2003
> Celan

TODTNAUBERG

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
Hütte,

written in the book
- whose name did it record
before mine - ?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker’s
word
to come,
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,

he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,

humidity,
much.

TODTNAUBERG

Arnika, Augentrost, der
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Sternwürfel drauf,

in der
Hütte,

die in das Buch
- wessen Namen nahms auf
vor dem meinen? -
die in dies Buch
geschriebene Zeile von
einer Hoffnung, heute,
auf eines Denkenden
kommendes
Wort
im Herzen,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,
Orchis und Orchis, einzeln,

Krudes, später, im Fahren
deutlich,

der uns fährt, der Mensch,
der’s mit anhört,

die halb-
beschrittenen Knüppel-
pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,
viel.

"Is this going too far? Is the reader, or translator, or exegete, or hermeneut digging too far below the surface of the poem's word? I don't think so. It is exactly in those "semantic geological stratifications," if I may say so, of that one little word, "Wasen" used instead of the more usual "Wiesen," i.e., in the substitution of an "a" for a long "ie," that the poem opens up from the restricted economy of a containable and constrainable structure (the simple, tight network of traditional poetic surface devices as exemplified here by the rhymes of the "a's") to the movement of a more general economy, a mise-en-scene, where "meaning", "reference" etc. begin to leak, to "bleed" into an unconstrainable chain."
(CELAN / HEIDEGGER: TRANSLATION AT THE MOUNTAIN OF DEATH by P i e r r e J o r i s)

:: comment :: . . . fascinated by the digging . . . greedy for more information . . . repeating & repeating & repeating . . . repetition is a form of change . . .

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