In honor of Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel – host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Paul Celan, including his famous “Death Fugue.”

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitcz in 1920. The death of his parents in the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in a Romanian work camp are the defining forces in his poetry and use of language. Celan wrote in German. According to Pierre Joris, who translated Celan’s later poetry, he “harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through a “dismantling and rewelding” of German.”

“Death Fugue”:

“Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped”

Texts:
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. W.W. Norton & Co. 2001
Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Press, 1995.

Music:
Felix Mendelssohn – Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, op.35 no.1
Felix Mendelssohn – Songs Without Words, op.19 no.6 in G Minor
Felix Mendelssohn – Songs Without Words, op.30 no.6 in F Sharp Minor

Producer: Laragh Widdess
Technical producer: Alex Benish