A few days after completing his reading of Wrong Paths Celan turned to a 1947 edition of the thinker’s Letter on Humanism and, according to dates he entered in the text, read it on August 21 and 23, 1953.

Driven into the
terrain
with the unmistakable track:

​“Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed.”

Spill into the lake
but a drop of wine
and the sun vanishes.

There used to be a shooting range in the district center of Barysh.

There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.

John Donne has sunk in sleep...All things beside
are sleeping too: walls, bed, and floor-all sleep.

Completely destroyed

The power lines stretched
across the kingdom of frost
north of all music.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.

The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological romance, a romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in Christian Irony.

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

Up to the moment of the yellow sunset,

Un sauce de cristal, un chopo de agua,

Del aire al aire, como una red vacía,

The old pond-
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.

When Crow cried his mother's ear
Scorched to a stump.

As from my childhood,...

Too old to carry arms and fight like the others -

Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends.

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch

Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον
σπεῦδε, τὰν δ’ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises. A few leaded p