Aletheia

[vagantes]

Celan's parents died in the death camp at Transnistria.
Weakened by typhus, his mother
Knelt down in the dust
Before being shot through the neck.

Death is a master from Germany.
His eyes are blue,
Like the loving air
Through which the swallows flew.

Paul Celan met Dr Martin Heidegger,
Once Nazi-approved Rector of Freiburg University,
At his hut in the Black Forest;
A woodland sward, surrounded by orchids.

By his death by water he denied the earth
And the rootedness of dwelling places.
"Wozu Dichter"? asked the philosopher.
Physis is poiesis; but we split them asunder.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Not sure I perfectly understand this but admire your interweaving of histpry and poetry. This


Death is a master from Germany.

is a direct quote from a great poem by Celan and should have been attributed.

[Lokasenna]

Not sure I perfectly understand this but admire your interweaving of histpry and poetry.

Agreed. Good, but confusing!

[vagantes]

As the poem on one level concerns itself with Paul Celan, I am not sure that attribution is necessary, being slightly obvious.

If anyone is concerned about such matters and to save excessive googling: "the loving air through which the swallows flew" is a recasting of a recasting of some lines of Holderlin (much beloved of Heidegger) by the scholar Ludwig van Pigenot. "Woodland sward" is a phrase from Celan's poem "Todtnauberg" which describes his meeting with Heidegger. "Wozu Dichter?" (What are Poets for?) is the title of Heidegger's lecture delivered on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Rainer Maria Rilke.

It is not for me to say, but a writer is entitled to expect his readers to meet the poem with respect or do we now as critics in The Age of Resentment lose sight of such niceties.

Aletheia means unconcealment and thus according to Heidegger:a revealing or the truth.

Read the poem to reveal the inner nature of the thing.

[Lokasenna]

I think that what Prince says about attributing things is actually pretty fair. I'm quite well-read, and I've never come across Ludwig van Pigenot or Paul Celan. In such cases, being informed of the source of the words can help me get another level of understanding.

It's not about being a poor critic; you can't expect readers to have an encyclopeadic knowledge of world poetry. Look at something like Eliot's masterpiece, The Wasteland - without his copious footnotes, a lot of people would have been even more confused by it than they already are, and some well-read fellows would be accusing him of plagarism!

[vagantes]

I would expect that if a reader found a mention of Paul Celan in a poem then natural curiosity would direct him or her to find out more about the poet. There's nothing difficult about doing that, surely?

I can provide a reductive version if required, but as this is a literary forum I would have thought we were beyond such matters.

For readers who are grasping after the references etc., here are some clues.

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who may have had Nazi sympathies. Paul Celan was a Rumanian Jew whose parents died in German concentration camps. His poem on The Holocaust is well known and includes the lines:

Death is a Master from Germany
with eyes of blue.

Heidegger's favourite poet was Holderlin. In 1823 a student called Waiblinger published a novel entitled Phaeton whose hero was clearly based on Holderlin, who at this time was insane and was confined in a tower in the city of Tubingen. The novel has a supposed sample of the mad poet's writing which begins " in lieblicher Blaue". The scholar von Pigenot decided to recast this fragment in verse and attribute it to Holderlin:

" In lovely blue the steeple blossoms
With its metal roof. Around which
Drift swallow cries, around which
Lies most loving blue."

Celan clearly works this echo into his poem to question Heidegger's values.

My poem reworks this questioning and is concerned about the evil which underlies much of Heidegger's influence which is considerable, as is that of other figures in Hitler's government eg Richard Walther Darre a pioneer ecologist and advocate/ inventor of organic farming as agricultural minister to Adolf Hitler.

The key question is:what are poets for and do they provide values for the way we live?