Paul Celan was not an easy man—why would he be?—and his poetry, as his translator Michael Hamburger writes, is not easy either. Celan, Hamburger says, “calls for an application and effort so intense that it may have to be broken off and resumed over the years.” That is definitely true of “Death Fugue.” It is hard to take in without a break. But to take in even a portion of it is to have taken in something unforgettable. Celan wrote almost exclusively in German, so it makes sense that his most successful poem, "Todesfuge," or “Death Fugue," is in the language of the Nazi death machine. Here is a selection:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from
Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke
you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined
(from "Death Fugue" by Paul Celan)
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