Abend Der Worte

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1950

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” can be read as ars poetica, a poem about writing. Celan published several poems explicitly titled “Ars Poetica”; the process of writing is a poetic obsession of his. There are 21 lines of varying lengths in “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words,” making the white space on the right-hand side of the poem into a jagged line akin to the serrations of a knife or the bitting edge of a key.

The poem is divided into three stanzas. The stanza size first doubles, moving from four lines in stanza one to eight in stanza two, then grows by one line to nine in stanza three. Neither the English translation this guide refers to nor the original German has a regular meter.

Address

In “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words,” as in many of his other poems, Celan uses the second-person, “who sometimes seems to be the deity in whom the poems may or may not show belief, but at other times may be the reader or a Buberian principle of addressable personhood in humans generally” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Page 8). In other words, the ‘you’ of Celan’s poetry can be an individual, humanity as a whole, and/or a higher power. At times, the addressee of the poem occupies multiple definitions of ‘you.’ For instance, the reader is both an individual and the whole human race—‘you’ contains their personal past as well as the past of their species.

One result of using the second-person is the erasure of the self as a separate and distinct thing, negating existence and calling to mind a complete death with no afterlife. This conflates all the you’s of the poem into an indistinguishable mass, examining how negative experiences can take people out of their separate places and bring them together with each other and/or the world.

Concision

Celan is also known for his almost concision, distilling language into as few words as possible. This technique arose in postwar literature as a way to bear “political meanings [...] silence is not only sacramental and memorial but emblematic of language’s potential violence” (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Page 294). Language played a role in the Holocaust: Nazi regimes across Europe relied on doublespeak, bureaucratic euphemism, and vicious anti-Semitic propaganda to buttress their genocidal actions. Moreover, German, which Celan writes in, is the language that the Nazis used—it felt polluted after the war. One example of silence, or omitting words, in “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” is the ellipsis at end of the second stanza (Line 12). Ellipses are used to signify words that are not said, ideas that cannot be rendered in language, and/or thought that gets lost.

Difficulty

Celan’s poetry is famously difficult to understand and analyze, as he purposefully wrote in cryptic, gnomic shorthand, incorporating similes and metaphors that are often hard to parse or fully explain. This is because Celan wants his form to mirror his content: He wrestles with difficult questions, such as how the Holocaust was possible or how human beings could perpetrate such a monstrosity, so his poems must also be difficult to read.