Breathturn into Timestead Read Online Free

exclamation in the play—“Long live the king!”—as “a word against the grain, the word which cuts the ‘string,’ which does not bow to the ‘bystanders and old warhorses of history.’ It is an act of freedom. It is a step.” In short, it is what Celan calls a Gegenwort , a “counterword,” and thus the word of poetry. But, he goes on, there is an even fiercer Gegenwort , and that is Lenz’s silence: “Lenz—that is, Büchner—has gone a step farther than Lucile. His ‘Long live the king’ is no longer a word. It is a terrifying falling silent, it takes away his—and our—breath and words.” It is in the next sentence that Celan introduces the term Atemwende :
    Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende , a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route—also the route of art—for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in one direction—perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa’s head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down—for this single short moment? Perhaps here, with the I—with the estranged I set free here and in this manner —perhaps here a further Other is set free?
    Perhaps the poem is itself because of this … and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art—time and again?
    Perhaps. 17
    I have quoted this passage at length not only because it may be the one that most closely defines Celan’s thinking about poetry, but also to give a sense of its rhetorical texture, its tentative, meditative, one could say groping, progress. The temptation—and many critics have not resisted it—would be to extract from the passage the definitive, affirmative statement “Poetry is a breathturn,” but in the process one would have discarded the series of rhetorical pointers, the ninefold repetition of the word vielleicht , “perhaps,” which turns all the sentences into questions. The passage is, however, not an isolated rhetorical formula in the speech; indeed, one could argue that the whole of the Meridian speech is a putting into question of the possibilities of art, in Celan’s own words, “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst,” which all of poetry (and art in general) has to submit to today if it wants to be of essential use. Gerhard Buhr, in an essay analyzing the Meridian speech from exactly this angle, comments on Celan’s expression “eine radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” as follows:
    The phrase “radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” (radical putting-into-question of art) has a double meaning given the two ways the genitive can read: Art, with “everything that belongs and comes to it” … has to be radically questioned; and it [art] puts other things, such as man or poetry, radically into question. That is exactly why the question of poetry, the putting-into-question of poetry is not exterior to art —: The nature of art is rather to be discussed and clarified in connection with the nature of the question itself. 18
    Celan, a careful poet not given to rhetorical statements or linguistic flourishes, who in his late poems will castigate himself and his own early work for an overuse of such “flowers,” needs to be taken quite literally here: he is groping, experimenting, questioning, trying to find his way to a new possibility in poetry. It is a slow process: the term Atemwende , coined in this speech of 1960, will reemerge as the title of a volume only seven years later.
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    The last book published before the Meridian speech had been Sprachgitter , which had come out the previous year and already