"Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But don’t split off No..." - Paul Celan

Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But don’t split off No from Yes.Give your say this meaning too:Give it the shadow.Give it shadow enough,Give it as muchAs you know is spread round you fromMidnight to midday and midnight.Look around:See how things all come alive-By death! Alive!Speaks true who speaks shadow.But now the place shrinks, where you stand:Where now, shadow-stripped, where?Climb. Grope upwards.Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!Finer: a threadThe star wants to descend on:So as to swim down beliow, down hereWhere it sees itself shimmer:in the swellOf wandering words.

— Paul Celan
Language poet of Romanian birth, holocaust survivor

shadow speak truth words

About This Quote

About Paul Celan

Paul Celan was a 20th-century German language poet of romanian birth, holocaust survivor. Paul Celan was a German-speaking Romanian poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. He adopted his pen name following the war and resided in France from 1949, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1955. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

Truth — Meditations on honesty, authenticity, and the search for truth

More quotes by Paul Celan

“Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But dont split off No from Yes.Give your say this meaning too:Give it the shadow.Give it shadow enough,Give it as muchAs you know is spread ro...”

— Paul Celan

shadow speak truth words

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”

— Paul Celan

poetry

“How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.”

— Paul Celan

paul-celan poetry

“A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on...”

— Paul Celan

language poem

“They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very bei...”

— Paul Celan

language reality-wounded

“Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its o...”

— Paul Celan

language loss speech

View all quotes by Paul Celan →