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We are told that when Hölderlin went 'mad,' he constantly repeated, 'Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.'

Paul Celan

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Paul Celan
Age: 49 †
Born: 1920
Born: November 23
Died: 1970
Died: April 20
Essayist
Lyricist
Poet
Translator
Czernowitz
Paul Antschel
Paul Ancel
Went
Nothing
Repeated
Mad
Happenings
Happening
Constantly
Told

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A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing--, the no one's rose.
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With a changing key, you unlock the house where the snow of what’s silenced drifts. Just like the blood that bursts from Your eye or mouth or ear, so your key changes. Changing your key changes the word That may drift with flakes. Just like the wind that rebuffs you, Clenched round your word is the snow.
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German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts beauty. It tries to be truthful.
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Tall poplars--human beings of this earth!
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The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?
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There was earth inside them, and they dug.
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Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown.
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I went with my very being toward language.
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Spring: trees flying up to their birds
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Illegibility of this world. All things twice over. The strong clocks justify the splitting hour, hoarsely. You , clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.
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There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.
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With wine and being lost, with less and less of both: I rode through the snow, do you read me I rode God far--I rode God near, he sang, it was our last ride over the hurdled humans. They cowered when they heard us overhead, they wrote, they lied our neighing into one of their image-ridden languages.
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He speaks truly who speaks the shade.
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you're rowing by wordlight
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who is invisible enough to see you
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in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air
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How you die out in me: down to the last worn-out knot of breath you're there, with a splinter of life.
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They've healed me to pieces.
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The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.
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no one bears witness for the witness
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