It’s less evident who is being addressed, who is doing the addressing - and for that matter, the poem ends by deliberately blurring the distinction. What’s immediately apparent is the ardent intensity of address embodied in this poem. Words as stones we find, I think, in a poem like this one, which I quote in full, from the 1963 collection Die Niemandsrose - in Joris’s translation, “NoOnesRose” (as with many of Celan’s poems, the poem’s title is not separated out from the body of the text, but consists of its first words rendered in small caps): As Daive writes, “Paul Celan chews a word like a stone.” We too have to break our teeth on them. And if it resists being read, that resistance itself becomes something to be read. “Among the basic characteristics of poetry,” he once wrote, “is that it knows itself to be exposed to misunderstanding.” Because of this, his work acquired a reputation for difficulty, but that’s misleading if it implies that his is an ‘intellectual’ poetry on the contrary, what we might experience as torsions or distortions of language register the extremity of emotion rather than speak of difficulty, it would be better to say, simply, that one never knows in advance how to read this poetry: One can only learn how to read it by reading it. His use of the German language was always estranged and estranging. Celan, therefore, wrote always as a foreigner.
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