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Much o f this work proved helpful in revising and fine-tuning the translations— something I keep doing today and will no doubt keep doing in the future. 36 The detailed narrative o f the various stages o f this project is not meant to propose the count o f years and the accumulation o f versions as proof o f quality; to the contrary: it is meant to relativize the very notion o f a definitive, final translation. Any given stage was as definite a translation as I could make at that time, and next years version would no doubt be different from this one.

Reality for Celan, maybe more so than for any other poet this century, was the word, was language. Radically dispossessed o f any other real­ ity he set about to create his own language— a language as absolutely exiled as he himself. e. to find a similarly current English or Am eri­ can “ Umgangssprache”— would be to miss an essential aspect o f the poetry, the linguistic under-mining and displacement that creates a multi-perspectivity m irror­ ing and reticulating the polysemous meanings o f the work.

Von un getrau m tem 4 geatzt, wirft das schlaflos durchwanderte Brotiand den Lebensberg auf. Aus seiner Krume knetest du neu unsre Namen, die ich, ein deinem gleichendes Aug an jedem der Finger, abtaste nach einer Stelle, durch die ich mich zu dir heranwachen kann, die helle Hungerkerze im Mund. By t h e u n d r e a m t etched, the sleeplessly wandered-through breadland casts up the life mountain. From its crumb you knead anew our names, which I, an eye similar to yours on each finger, probe for a place, through which I can wake myself toward you, the bright hungercandle in mouth.