Tell me again of the lepers who learn to shed their disastrous skin by eating the meat of vipers: something transmutable in the flesh. The ancients spent lifetimes considering the resurrection of irretrievable parts: wolf-devoured flank, eyes of martyrs pecked clean in a village square. Tell me again about the new heaven and the new earth,
when the bear returns an unblemished arm to its faithful socket, when mountains open their mouths to receive conduits and I-beams and engagement diamonds and the fish ladders the rivers will give up with their dams when the earth is made new. Tell me the formula
for feeling whole again after tragedy. The equation for how much time I needed after saying no before I’d tell you yes. Tell me I’ll never be alone, even when I want to be alone.
"From 1967’s Atemwende (Breathturn) on, Celan’s later work is so deeply rooted in German—its capacity for endless agglutination, obscure technical and scientific vocabularies, archaic usages, etymological puns—that it seems to defy translation....the poems’ darkness, their obscurity of utterance is part of their very nature."
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"One verse in particular left me unsatisfied with my translation: 'pasan bajo el calor de mi ventana' became 'pass beneath my sweltry window.' 'Sweltry' is a weighty word, and I imagine the nuns suffering under their frocks in the Caribbean heat, but 'calor' remits to human warmth, even tenderness, those things—like the smell of used books and towels and the entangled scent of incense—that are of the flesh."
