Argumentum e Silento
For René Char
Chained up
between gold and oblivion:
the night.
Both reached out for it.
Both let it be.
Lay,
you also now lay down that which seeks
to rise dawning beside the days:
the word overflown by stars,
drenched by the seas.
To each the word.
To each the word that sang for that one
when the pack attacked from behind –
To each the word that sang for that one and froze.
You, the night,
the overflown by stars, the sea-drenched.
You the won by silence
whose blood did not clot when the poison fang
pierced the syllables.
You the word won by silence.
Against those others who soon,
whored about by the bloodsucker ears,
climb time and eras too,
it bears witness at the last,
at the last, when chains only sound,
bears witness to her who lies there
between gold and oblivion,
sister to both from the outset –
For where
but with her does it dawn, tell me,
who in the river zone of her tears
shows the seed to submerging suns
again and ever again.
*
IN THE GREAT listening you lie,
flaked over, all bushed up.
Go to the Spree, to the Havel,
go to the butchers’ meat-hooks,
to the red apple stooks
from Sweden –
Then comes the table with gifts,
it curves round an Eden –
The man is a sieve now, the woman,
that sow, does a belly-flop,
for herself, for no one, for everyone.
The Landwehr Canal will not roar.
Nothing
comes to a stop.
*
ON BOTH HANDS, yonder
where stars grew for me, far
from all skies, near
all skies:
How
one’s awake there! How
the world opens up for us, right
through our middle!
You are,
where your eye is, you are
above, are
below, I
find my way out.
Oh this meandering empty
hospitable middle. Separate,
I grow yours, you
grow mine, loosed
from each other, we see
right through:
the
same
has lost
us, the
same
has forgotten
us, the
same
has — us.
*
BLACK,
like memory’s wound,
my eyes root for you
in the crown land bitten
bright by the heart teeth,
our bed even now:
through this shaft you must come –
you come.
In the seed-
sense
the sea stars you forth, inmostly, for ever.
The name-giving ends here,
on to you I throw my fate.
*
ETERNITIES I have
died away from,
a letter touches
your fingers, uninjured
still,
the radiant brow
comes leaping in
and beds itself
in fragrances, rustlings.
*
WAYS IN THE SHADOW-ROCKSLIDE
of your hand.
From the four-finger furrow
I root out for myself the
petrified blessing.
Translated by Michael Hamburger
Page(s) 32-35
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