Psalm

by Paul Celan

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one.

Praised be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards you.

A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no one’s rose.

With our pistil soul-bright, with our stamen heaven-ravaged, our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, O over the thorn.

From “Poems of Paul Celan” (Persea Books: $24.95; 352 pp.; 0-89255-140-2), translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger. Celan, one of the most important of all modern poets in German, was born into a Jewish family in 1920. Although his parents were killed in the Nazi genocide attempt, he himself escaped and spent most of his productive years in France. His poetry, set against the black backdrop of the early loss of his family, brought him great acclaim in the 1950s. If Primo Levi is the greatest Jewish novelist and prose writer on the shoah, Paul Celan--writing, in a way, for all those Jews who were not in the death camps but might have been--is the greatest poet. He died, a suicide, in 1970. This collection enlarges by one-third a 1980 edition of Celan’s work that won Hamburger a major translation prize. 1989, Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books.

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