I don't know how many times I've walked across that bridge and thought of Celan and the murky waters below. The German of this is much different, more hitting.
For some reason I enjoy giving a personal meaning to the cryptic pieces of poetry that I read. 😅 This one made no exception for the experience of reading it felt like a riddle inviting to deepen your head into it and taste a bit of its secret fragrances. It took me a while to find a possible interpretation but ultimately this is what I got after reading a bit of author’s biography that I knew nothing about:
The room upstairs is the day to day reality. The room below is the secret space where the two lovers consume their secret relationship until someone else comes to take the man’s place in his paramour’s life (probably as a husband). That at least is how I interpret: “Someone will come and it will, at last, be rented.” At that moment they will return into the real world on separate roads to be “killed/consumed” by reality: “We'll return upstairs to drown alone at home” 😉 Sweet, bitter, hopeless…
I think I’m really dense this morning. I’m not getting Celan’s poem at all.
Here’s some bio:
As a Romanian Jew, he had a very difficult life, 1920-1970. He was a translator and major German language poet. He became a French citizen, and ultimately drowned himself in the Seine.
“…Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel (another name he went by), heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”
He is mixing metaphors and that is opaque and the only clarity he sends is the wish that it was translucent. Her eyes are not phosphorescent but Paul would wish they were an adjacent forest species to us who can live on love and walnuts. I would not look for a cross language innuendo about walnuts, he and she had a bowl of walnuts. This is like Williams's "i almost left you a peach in the fridge" poem, except Celan proposes that if things are going to feel as heavy as jobs or lonely needy as being a night worker that he does not offer to double down and become a doctor, let's wish on a falling tree fruit rather, he wld say, than the compassion of the stars. Rather than that old vault of heaven .
We’ve all lived like this once, in the same apartment. He mixed memory with dreaming
I don't know how many times I've walked across that bridge and thought of Celan and the murky waters below. The German of this is much different, more hitting.
For some reason I enjoy giving a personal meaning to the cryptic pieces of poetry that I read. 😅 This one made no exception for the experience of reading it felt like a riddle inviting to deepen your head into it and taste a bit of its secret fragrances. It took me a while to find a possible interpretation but ultimately this is what I got after reading a bit of author’s biography that I knew nothing about:
The room upstairs is the day to day reality. The room below is the secret space where the two lovers consume their secret relationship until someone else comes to take the man’s place in his paramour’s life (probably as a husband). That at least is how I interpret: “Someone will come and it will, at last, be rented.” At that moment they will return into the real world on separate roads to be “killed/consumed” by reality: “We'll return upstairs to drown alone at home” 😉 Sweet, bitter, hopeless…
a lot of yearning, melancholy, existential angst. When you see your homeland crumble before your eyes and all the lies, the lies, the lies.
That last line!!
I think I’m really dense this morning. I’m not getting Celan’s poem at all.
Here’s some bio:
As a Romanian Jew, he had a very difficult life, 1920-1970. He was a translator and major German language poet. He became a French citizen, and ultimately drowned himself in the Seine.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-celan
“…Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel (another name he went by), heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”
He is mixing metaphors and that is opaque and the only clarity he sends is the wish that it was translucent. Her eyes are not phosphorescent but Paul would wish they were an adjacent forest species to us who can live on love and walnuts. I would not look for a cross language innuendo about walnuts, he and she had a bowl of walnuts. This is like Williams's "i almost left you a peach in the fridge" poem, except Celan proposes that if things are going to feel as heavy as jobs or lonely needy as being a night worker that he does not offer to double down and become a doctor, let's wish on a falling tree fruit rather, he wld say, than the compassion of the stars. Rather than that old vault of heaven .
We all sometimes drown alone at home.
Happiness is only real when shared.
Last line kills