Your Hair above the Sea
Your hair too hovers above the sea with the golden juniper.
Together with it turns white, but I dye it stone-blue:
that city’s colour where last I was dragged to the south . . .
With ropes they bound me and knotted a sail to each one
and spat at me from their misty mouths and sang out:
“O come over the sea!”
But I as a dinghy painted my pinions purple
and wheezed a breeze for myself and before they slept sailed away.
Now it is red I should dye them, your locks, but I like them stone- blue:
O eyes of the city where, felled, I was dragged to the south:
with the golden juniper now your hair too hovers above the sea.
*
VOICELESS, ABOVE, the
travellers, vulture and star.
Below, after everything, we,
ten in number, the sad folk. Time,
how could it not, has
an hour even for us, here
in the sand city.
(Tell of the well, tell
of the well-shaft, well-wheel, of
well cisterns – tell.
Count and recount, the clock,
even that, runs down.
Water: what
a word. We’re wise to you, life.)
The stranger, uninvited, from where,
the guest.
His dripping clothes.
His dripping eye.
(Tell me of wells, of –
Count and recount.
Water: what
a word.)
His clothes-and-eye, like us
he’s filled with night, he betokens
insight, he counts now,
as we do, to ten
and no further.
Above, the
travellers
remain
inaudible.
Michael Hamburger writes: These poems, translated later than those in the Anvil Press and Penguin selections, belong to different phases of Celan’s life and work, and were intended to fill gaps in my earlier selection for a slightly enlarged edition due in the USA. The first poem is a very early one, the others belong to Celan’s middle period and that of his last years. ‘IN THE GREAT listening’ originated in a visit of Celan’s to Berlin and refers to sights seen there just before Christmas, the former Hotel Eden from which the revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were escorted to be shot, and the building in which the 1944 conspirators against Hitler were hanged on meathooks.
Translated by Michael Hamburger
Page(s) 30-31
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