Abend Der Worte

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1950

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Process of Writing

“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” is a metaphorical journey of searching for words, the process that a writer goes through when composing a new work. In the poem, this seemingly intellectual task cannot help but rip open the poet’s deep-seated psychological wounds and expose to him the darkest aspects of human nature.

The poem opens with an evening quest for “words” (Line 1), but this at first charming task turns darker as evening turns into “Wordnight” (Line 8), a compound word that tries to get across in translation Celan’s original German coinage. This night, which has come before the writer has found the words he is looking for, is when “shadow[s]” (Line 4) get longer, and the search for words must occur in growing darkness, in the unilluminated space behind closed eyes. The danger of the Wordnight is ripping open of “Time’s scar” (Line 5) and the intrusion into the body of uncontrollable, voracious mastiffs.

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In the final stanza, the diction and light changes. There is “one last moon” (Line 13) that offers a type of light—light that is reflected. Complementing this is how the diction of ‘words/word’ disappears and is replaced by images. Writers, in the process of finding the words for their poems, come upon images to describe. The “beam” (Line 18) from the moon offers the image of a piece of “fruit” (Line 20) that “you” (Line 21) first tasted years ago, and that is now presumably rotten and inedible. The bitten fruit is an incredibly symbolic image in Western tradition, immediately alluding to the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that led God to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis. Here, you are in the position of Adam, being proffered an already bitten fruit by the foamy moonlight that stands in for Eve. But you are also Eve, since you are the one that took the first bite out of this fruit. You acquired knowledge of evil already, and this new offer of the fruit will not bring you knowledge of good. This final image of Celan’s poem ends his search: he begins by looking for words, but could only find his past trauma and pain.

Inescapability of the Past

Another way to approach Celan’s poem is to follow the threads of thought about time. Writers are eternally haunted by their pasts, “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” argues. The title and first line introduce the concept of time, setting the poem in the “evening” (Line 1). Though the day has passed, its influence remains: the shadows created by the fading sun are unable to “erase” (Line 4) the “trace” of footsteps (Line 3). In other words, the passage of time does not erase the actions of the past—they are inescapable.

The past is more directly referenced in the beginning of the second stanza. It is here cast as the repository of injury, trauma, and violence: When the writer inevitably confronts their past, “Time’s scar / opens / and floods the land with blood” (Lines 5-7), a viscerally gory image that shows that the past—especially a past rife with the damage of surviving a genocide—refuses to fully heal. The verb “floods” (Line 7) evokes a collective past, calling to mind the mythical genocides of religious texts and traditions. Celan turning the water of these flood stories into blood points to a different kind of attempted genocide: the Holocaust.

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The inescapability of the past is reiterated at the end of the poem. Even years later, the past “foams toward you” (Line 19). Memory rides in on a moon-”beam” (Line 18), which slowly descends on you, as indicated by the diction of “foams” (Line 19). The past approaches you, specifically “woke[n]” (Line 18) by the act of searching for words, but it is always present and ready to come to the surface. The last image of the poem is an outstretched fruit that you bit into “years ago” (Line 21), echoing Eve handing Adam the fruit in the biblical Garden of Eden. You have already absorbed the knowledge that fruit can offer, but it will never be fully consumed, instead turning into a bitter, rotten thing you keep coming across.

Humans’ Bestial Nature

In contrast with the past, the poem’s present is defined through animals. In the second stanza, “now” (Line 9) is the time when “mastiffs” (Line 8), or large dogs bred for hunting and war, “bay right / inside you” (Lines 9-10). The internal space of the present is filled with the howling of large animals—animals that are not truly wild, but ones specifically raised to be vicious and aggressive by humans. Summoned when the land has been covered by the blood of the ripped open scar, these dogs “celebrate the wilder thirst, / the wilder hunger” (Lines 11-12). Unlike undomesticated predators that hunt only when hungry and eat until they are sated, the mastiffs boast an outsized, bloodthirsty appetite that is not natural: It is “wilder” than wild.

The “hounds” (Line 16) reappear in the third stanza when the moon throws them a “bone” (Line 14), which is “bare” (Line 15). Unfortunately, this meatless bone could never nurture these dogs—the bone is merely a distraction that is not enough to “save you” (Line 17) from them permanently. The bone, which recalls sacrifices like the massacre of the firstborn in the story of Exodus, offers only a temporary solution. The vicious hunger of the base dogs of human nature can only be briefly interrupted, but will always return.

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At the end of the poem, food reappears in the form of fruit that was eaten in the past. The piece of fruit that “you bit into, years ago” (Line 21) is not aiding the needs of the present—it is no longer food, but a rotting reminder of the knowledge you consumed in the past (as it echoes Eve’s fruit in the story of Genesis). The “wilder hunger” (Line 12) of “now” (Line 9) remains alongside the inescapable past.