Abend Der Worte

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1950

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Night

Most of the poem occurs at night: a time that begins with an “Evening of the Words” and ends during the dark time of what Celan calls “Wordnight” (Line 8). The evening offers a lengthening “shadow” (Line 4) that only calls attention to the footprints you leave as you craft your writing. That shadow is soon replaced by the dark in which menacing dogs invade your body.

The third stanza begins when the “last moon leaps to your rescue” (Line 13). The word “last” is ambiguous, indicating either a phase in the moon’s cycle, or the fact that the writer is doomed to never see a moon like this again. The moon is often symbolically connected with madness, and its “beam” (Line 18) carries the past, with its inescapable pain to you, who have already tasted this sadness. The moon is connected with dogs and water, two other symbols that appear in the poem.

Water

The motif of water runs throughout “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words.” The first line introduces the idea that the addressee is using a “dowser” (Line 1), or a divination rod that is most commonly associated with searching for water. Water returns in the second stanza with the verb “floods” (Line 7). This can be read symbolically as the Abrahamic flood where Noah and his animals were saved while most of humanity died. Celan replaces the waters of the flood with “blood” (Line 7), however, indicating a more violent scenario. Rather than the God-sent flood, the man-made Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out people who were not of the correct ethnic, and religious, group.

Water is transformed into a different state in the third stanza, as a moonbeam “foams” (Line 19). Water has to be in a fully fluid state to flood, as in the second stanza. Water’s polarity also allows it to form temporary super-thin structures with an infusion of air. The resulting foam is between states of matter, a semisolid structure composed of liquids and gasses. The foaming moonbeam has a piece of fruit “floating” (Line 20) on top of it. This indicates that there is a type of fluid, watery movement to the foam, despite being transformed.

Food

The mastiffs that invade the body of the writer in the second stanza are ravenously, insatiably hungry—a description that clarifies the third stanza’s introduction of different potential sources of food, neither of which can actually nourish. First, there is a meatless bone that simply distracts the animals but offers no sustenance or long-term peace. Then, a moonbeam offers the writer fruit the writer has already bitten many years earlier—thus another now-inedible object. The bitten fruit alludes to the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; when Eve and Adam bit into this fruit, God expelled them from the Garden of Eden and doomed mankind to a life of pain and toil that in Jewish tradition will only end with the coming of the Messiah. The attainment of the fruit at the conclusion of the poem also indicates finally finding the words you were searching for in the Wordnight, paralleling the painful attainment of knowledge of good and evil.

Dogs

In the original German, Celan uses the word “Doggen,” (Line 8) which Joris translates as mastiffs, which are large dogs bred to an imposing size for war and hunting. The dogs of “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” are menacing antagonists, coming with the flood of blood spilled from the ripped open scar, infesting your body with their unyielding hunger. The “bone” (Line 14) thrown to the hounds doesn’t slake their hunger: it is meatless, so it can distract them, but will not nourish them.

The choice of “mastiffs” versus wolves (who have greater associations with both wildness and the moon) indicates that the fact that the mastiffs are domesticated is important. Dogs, as the product of thousands of years of animal husbandry, are the creation of humans, a fact echoed within the poem by the mastiffs emerging from the consciousness of the addressee. This reflects both the difficult human-created nature of language, which Celan struggled with as a translator, and the greatness of the horror of man-made terrors, such as the Holocaust.