Abend Der Worte

Celan’s 21-line free-verse poem is broken into three stanzas. The first stanza contains four lines; the second stanza contains eight lines; and the third stanza contains nine lines. The poem is written in the second-person, and examines how one interacts with language. It is heavily metaphoric; meaning the action of the poem is not literal.

In the first stanza, the reader is introduced to a time and activity. The poem takes place as evening turns into night, and is built around a quest that the poem’s main actor—“you”—is undertaking: the “evening of the words” (Line 1). The quest uses a specific kind of divination: a “dowser” (Line 1), or divining rod—a pseudo-scientific forked-stick device that ostensibly locates something valuable below ground. Dowsing is most commonly associated with the search for water, and water imagery pervades this poem. Furthermore, the dowsing is done “in stillness” (Line 1), which points to it being a metaphorical act that occurs within the mind.

The first stanza then includes a description of the physical act of dowsing, which the poem also metaphorizes. In the real world, a person who uses a dowser follows it, taking steps supposedly influenced by the rod’s signals. In the poem, the dowser you use causes you to take three steps. However, in your quest for words, the steps you’ve taken leave footprints—a “trace” (Line 3)—that cannot be erased by “your shadow” (Line 4). This turns seemingly literal movement into a metaphorical one. Possibly, by focusing so much on the intellectual work of word-finding, you’ve neglected to take care not to trample on your world, leaving careless marks of your progress that someone else will have to clean. An alternative reading could point to Celan’s personal history and his well-documented feelings of guilt at not being able to convince his parents to hide on the night they were taken to Transnistria: While you live on, writing poetry, you can never erase the history that has brought you to this spot and forever stains your identity.

The second stanza records the effects of time on a person’s animalistic nature or wildness. “Time’s scar” (Line 5), which is given its own line, can be read as the pain of the past—an image that links with the un-erasable footprints from the first stanza, although unlike the footprints, which you create with your own movement, the scar forms inescapably, without your agency. The scar “opens” (Line 6), a rupture that is so painful and significant that the verb is also given its own line—and adds to the water motif as it “floods” (Line 7) the land with blood. Dowsing has led you to such an overwhelming amount of pain from the past that wounds you thought had long been healed rip open with gruesome consequences. Floods are often considered apocalyptic events and feature in many myths, as well as the texts of many religions. The scope of this speaks to a collective past, which aligns with Celan’s frequent focus on the horrors of the Holocaust genocide, a wound in history that no scar could ever fully heal over.

After an em-dash, the second stanza introduces a new metaphor: mastiffs, or large, powerful dogs traditionally used for blood sport, hunting, and war. You encounter these menacing creatures as your original quest moves forward in time from evening of the poem’s first line to “Wordnight” (Line 8). The English translation uses this word to replicate the formation of compound nouns in German, something Celan used “to [construct] a critique of language and its influence on the perceptions of reality” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Page 1057). The Wordnight describes the way you perceive time when you are lost in your quest for words. In this state of confusion, the vicious dogs “bay” (Line 9) “inside you” (Line 10). No longer fully human, you have become a vessel for a terrifying pack of animals. It is important to consider why Celan chose mastiffs—domesticated attackers—rather than truly wild animals like wolves for the poem. Although the mastiffs “celebrate the wilder thirst” (Line 11) and hunger, their wildness is a reflection of the humans that have raised them to be aggressive and monstrous—the image of Nazi-bred German Shepherds springs to mind. They are not simply wild, they are specifically “wilder”—with a more pronounced hunger for the blood the scar has unleashed than regular predators would be. Their frightening appetites are inside you, revealing to you what you might be capable of if you unleash the full extent of your bestial nature. While they revel in their existence as a celebration, they are clearly a disturbing glimpse into your inner being. True malevolence and aggression do not come from wild nature, but from traits inculcated by people into the creatures that serve them (be they canine or human).

In the third stanza, actual nature intervenes in the scene, but even this welcome respite from the danger of the dogs is ambivalent. A moon comes to “your rescue” (Line 13), but this lifeline is not a permanent solution: This is the “last moon” (Line 13), either because you are doomed or because the next Wordnight will go by without any illumination. This moon throws a “bone among the hounds” (Line 14), briefly distracting the worst elements of your nature. The “bone” (Line 14), which can be read as a moonbeam because it is “silver” (Line 14), links back to the three steps taken in Lines 2-3—the “path you trod” (Line 15). It also connects to the ripped open scar: Possibly this bone is what remains exposed after the flood of blood has left the scar tissue. However, even the sacrifice of this bone is not enough to “save you” (Line 17). The bone is meatless, and thus cannot be sustenance for the ravenous dogs that have run loose in your body. Instead, its presence is an echo of an element of a traditional Passover Seder dinner: a lamb shank bone that represents the Tenth Plague sent by God before the Jews’ escape from slavery in Egypt in the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus. This Plague was the killing of all the firstborn sons—the massacre ordered by Pharaoh to punish the Jews that God reversed into a punishment for the Egyptians. This biblical story, recited at each Passover Seder, fits the brutal imagery of the rest of the poem: the bloody flood, the oppressive trauma of an unhealable past, and the ravage inflicted by the baser aspects of human nature that are responsible for fictive and real genocides.

The moon is not only incapable of saving you, but it also becomes a threat as your dowsing for words and the howling of your dogs has awoken a “beam” of light (Line 18) that now approaches—a confrontation that you are responsible for setting into motion. The beam takes on edible qualities—it “foams” (Line 19) and presents “a fruit” (Line 20). This recalls the “wilder hunger” (Line 12) in the second stanza, but also has other echoes. The mastiffs’ excessive aggression approaches rabid levels, an animal infection that often presents with foaming at the mouth. Like the dogs, the ray of moonlight does not have your best interests at heart. Instead, it shines a brutal light onto the past that has just been torn open, eager to make you re-experience it, as becomes clear in the poem’s final image. The foam bears rotten, half-eaten fruit that you already “bit into years ago” (Line 21). Your quest for words has inescapably led you away from intellectual pursuit into the need to face bodily fears, needs, and memories—all of which come with unbearable pain and bitterness. No matter your present-day pursuits, your past is inescapable.