CHAPTER II

Visibles Invisibles

SIMONIDES

Money is something visible and invisible at the same time. A “real abstraction,” in Marx’s terms. You can hold a coin in your hand and yet not touch its value. That which makes this thing “money” is not what you see.1 When the ancient Greeks talk of money, adjectives for “visible” and “invisible” occur inconsistently. Money can be found categorized as “invisible” when contrasted with real estate, for example; as “visible” when it means a bank deposit that is part of an inheritance.² Modern scholars have been unsuccessful in efforts to abstract a stable definition for these terms from ancient usage.³ In the view of the anthropologist Louis Gernet, the confusion represents a “flawed category” created by the Greeks when they tried to fit the many nuances of moneyed situations into a binary terminology. “The problem is, thought moves in many directions.”⁴ Money also moves in many directions. Simonides, we know, had occasion to observe these movements and to meditate on their relation to the phenomena of perception. He lived at an interface between two economic systems. His texts and testimonia make clear that he gave thought to the concepts of visible and invisible, was aware of a turmoil in their categorization and had an interest (conditioned perhaps by economic experience) in their valuing.⁵ This interest shows up especially in his statements about what poetry is and how it works. He seems to believe that the visible and invisible worlds lie side by side—may be interchangeable. Which of the two you notice is up to you. No lines just break off.

ICONOLOGY

Simonides is Western culture’s original literary critic, for he is the first person in our extant tradition to theorize about the nature and function of poetry. The central dictum of his literary critical theory is well known, much celebrated and little understood. “Simonides says that painting is silent poetry while poetry is painting that talks,” Plutarch tells us.6 What did the poet mean? Why did Simonides choose to inaugurate literary criticism by setting his own verbal art against the ground of painting?

It is true he was a most painterly poet, using proportionately more color words than any writer of his time and congratulated by Longinus for his pictorial power (εἰδωλοποίησε).⁷ His poems are well described as miniature canvases where each word is as meticulously placed as a brushstroke. In real life he seems to have enjoyed the society and patronage of painters, as a composer of inscriptions to identify art works on public display, for example, the sensational Iliupersis painted by Polygnotos at Delphi.⁸ Perhaps it was this association that inspired Simonides to formulate in such starkly iconologic terms his own philosophy of art, in the famous fragment:

ὁ λόγος τῶν πραγμάτων εἰκών ἐστιν.9

[The word is a picture of things.]

At any rate, he must have felt he had something to learn from what painters were doing, or from what people in his day were saying and thinking about painting. So let us consider what that was.

Inarguably, Simonides lived at a time when no thinking man could ignore what was going on in painting. As Pliny tell us, during this period “the art of painting set itself apart.”¹⁰ The fifth century B.C. saw a handful of Greek artists utterly revolutionize existing notions of the pictorial field, in a way that proved decisive not just for Greek art but for the whole subsequent history of European painting. Polygnotos and the generation of painters that followed him took as their starting point the two-dimensional picture plane of archaic style and developed a new technology for the representation of three-dimensional reality. With the invention of techniques like foreshortening, linear perspective, mixing and gradation of colors, superposition of paints and patching of surfaces, as well as various kinds of proportional adjustment for optical illusion, these painters transformed flat surface into an illusory world of objects moving in space.¹¹ They generated a body of technical data based on the parallel classification of painting and literature, which is standard still in our discourse about art. After the Polygnotan revolution, painters were no longer decorators of surfaces but magicians who conjured the real world upon the viewer’s eye.

APATĒ

The new science of three-dimensional representation created shockwaves that were felt far beyond Polygnotos’ paintbrush. “Painting is philosophy,” said Leonardo da Vinci, speaking from a culture confident in the painter’s power to transcribe reality.12 But ancient Greek culture registered a rather different response to the development of illusionism in art. We find one index of this in the vehemence with which Plato denounces painters and painting throughout his dialogues. For Plato, painting is not philosophy but sophistry, an art form devoted to replacing life with the lifelike and truth with what is convincing. “They create phantasms not reality” (ϕαντάσματα οὐκ ὄντα), he says, comparing painters with sophists as practitioners of a “phantastical technique” (ϕανταστικὴ τέχνη) whose product is “a sort of man-made dream created for those who are awake.”¹³ Plato’s quarrel is not with painting itself so much as with the use of any representational medium to defraud reality. By virtue of its power of deception, painting is analogous with sophistic rhetoric and also with the art of mimetic poetry, in Plato’s view: these three modes of illusion share a common delight in their own capacity to trick, dissemble and beguile.¹⁴ The term that came to be used for this capacity in the critical discourse of the fifth century was ἀπάτη: “deception,” “illusion,” “trickery”. The pursuit and perfection of ἀπάτη (apatē), the art of deception, was an explicit feature of sophistic aesthetic theory, both visual and verbal.

“The best painter or poet is the one who does the most deceiving,” says the anonymous sophist who composed the Dissoi logoi,¹⁵ and, we are informed by Gorgias, “the word (λόγος) that tricks you is more just than the λόγος that does not.”16 That trickery and illusion, or ἀπάτη, are somehow inherent in λόγος was an insight at least as old as Homer and Hesiod, which the sophists pursued to its logical extension.¹⁷ Teachers like Gorgias and Protagoras alleged that the proper activity of words is not to describe but to deceive and erected on this basis a pungent philosophy of language as well as a lucrative program of professional instruction, advertising themselves as educational successors to the ancient poets.¹⁸ Plato deplored the profession for the same reason that he deplored poetry all the way back to Homer, namely, that it cut words free from any obligation to reality. “Λόγος is its own master, a great δυνάστης” (“tyrant” or “power-monger”) able to “make all things its slaves.” So Gorgias tells us.¹⁹ It remains to be seen whether an ancient poet would have endorsed this tyrannical conception of words and how they work.

Situated between Polygnotos and Protagoras, Simonides was in a position to appreciate the impact made on the Greek popular imagination by illusionism, visual and verbal. Although older than the older sophists, Simonides anticipated their intellectual concerns so accurately that he has been designated a “proto-sophist” by critics modern and ancient.²⁰ Furthermore, Simonides was the first person in recorded Greek usage to employ the term ἀπάτη in its literary critical sense as “artistic illusion.”²¹ Yet Simonides could not, I think, have meant the same thing the sophists meant by ἀπάτη, nor accepted the severe critique of poetic function implied in their theory and practice of language as necessary deception.22

The sophists taught an art of persuasion that subsumed poetry to itself as one of several techniques useful for implanting opinions in the soul of a listener. Poetry, said Gorgias, is just “prose dressed up in meter,”²³ an artifact distinctive by virtue of its surface, not its content. He denied to λόγος in general any power to penetrate appearances: “The beauty of things unseen cannot be expressed in words,” he asserted.²⁴ Like the illusionist painter, the sophist is interested in nothing not visible on his canvas. “Some representations are better than others but none is truer,” says a Protagorean young person in Plato’s Theatetus. Or, as Leonardo da Vinci put it, “Paint extends only to the surface of bodies.”²⁵ Illusionism, in paint as in words, appears to have been at issue in the fifth century B.C. because it entails a total investment in the visible surface of the world as reality and a tendency to disavow the reality of anything not visible. Facts are all that matter and the facts are what you see. Among fifth-century painters, it was Zeuxis who most sensationally mastered the facts of illusionism. He is said to have rendered a bunch of grapes so realistically that birds flew down to peck at the canvas.²⁶ Among fifth-century sophists, it was Protagoras who most suavely formulated the philosophy of visible facts in his well-known dictum, “Man is the measure of all things, both of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” Sextus Empiricus cites this fragment for us and goes on to explain it in these terms:

Διὰ τοῦτο τίθησι τὰ ϕαινόμενα ἑκάστωι μόνα καὶ οὕτως εἰασάγει τὸ πρὸς τι.27

[In this way (Protagoras) posits only what is visible to each person and so introduces relativity.]

Protagorean relativity was a man-made dream to which Simonides would not have subscribed, as he made clear when he defined poetry by its difference from painting. For there is one thing a poem can do that a painting cannot, and in an age of sophistry and illusionism it is a thing of transforming importance, namely, render the invisible: Simonides’ iconology captures not only bird and grapes but also the stingy fact of the picture frame that separates them. His commitment is to a reality beyond “what is visible to each person.” His medium is words positioned so as to lead you to the edge where words stop, pointing beyond themselves toward something no eye can see and no painter can paint.

It is a rendering technique best observed at close range. Let us reconsider, in literal transcription, the celebrated Simonidean sentence cited above:

ὁ λόγος τῶν πραγμάτων εἰκών ἐστιν.

[The word of things a picture is.]

True to itself, the statement does what it says. It shows us λόγος and εἰκών poised on either side of the world of τῶν πραγμάτων in a syntactic tension that precisely pictures their ontology. “Things,” in the genitive case, depend for their meaning on “word” and “picture” at once: both nominatives vie for the attention of the genitive πραγμάτων, which is placed to read in either direction and unite all three words like the hinge of a backsprung bow.²⁸ It is a taut and self-controlled construction, but not self-sufficient. The verb ἐστιν (“is”) secures the relationship from outside, even though, in such a sentence in Greek, the verb “is” is redundant. Simonides’ ἐστιν insists on itself after other words have had their say and extraneous to their needs. Why? Simonides seems to want to paint more than words need to say. His iconic grammar renders a relationship that is mutual, dynamic and deeper than the visible surface of the language. As a painter who uses words to make paintings, Simonides requires of his reader a different kind of attention than we normally pay to verbal surfaces. It is a mode of attention well described by the Chinese painter Chiang Te Li, who wrote a treatise in the ninth century A.D. on how to do plum blossom. “Painting plum blossom is like buying a horse,” says Chiang Te Li; “you go by bone structure not by appearances.”29 When we consider Simonidean sentences, we see appearances engaged in a dialectic with one another, by participation of λὸγος and εἰκὼν at once. We overhear a conversation that sounds like reality. No other Greek writer of the period, except perhaps Heraklitos, uses the sentence in this way, as a “synthetic and tensional”³⁰ unit that reenacts the reality of which it speaks. This is mimesis in its most radical mechanism. This is the bone structure of poetic deception.

LEONIDAS

Simonides puts radical mimesis to use as public rhetoric in his well-known encomium for the Spartans dead at Thermopylai. Visibility and invisibility are a factor in the poem from the outset, if Herodotos is correct that no corpses were recovered to Sparta from Thermopylai after the incident.31 This is a dirge performed at an empty tomb. Its words bring the tombless bodies at Thermopylai and the bodiless tomb at Sparta into living relation:

τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων

εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλὸς δ᾿ ὁ πότμος,

βωμὸς δ᾿ ὁ τάϕος, πρὸ γόων δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ᾿ οἶκτος ἔπαινος·

ἐντάϕιον δὲ τοιοῦτον εὐρὼς

οὔθ᾿ ὁ πανδαμάτωρ ἀμαυρώσει χρόνος.

ανδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σηκὸς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν

Ἑλλάδος εἵλετο· μαρτυρεῖ δὲ καὶ Λεωνίδας,

Σπάρτας βασιλεύς, ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς

κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος.³²

[Of those dead in Thermopylai

glorious is the misfortune, good the doom,

the grave is an altar, in place of laments

is memory, the grief is praise.

Such an epitaph as this neither rust

nor all-annihilating time will darken.

This tomb of good men has chosen

the glory of Greece as its inhabitant.

And in fact Leonidas himself is witness,

king of Sparta: he left

excellence as a mark of beauty,

he left glory flowing forever.]

The poem begins with five statements that compose a fivefold conceptual shock (vv. 2–3). Simonides lines up a series of nouns and adjectives in tensile pairs, so that they seem to defy one another and to threaten the conventional categories of epitaphic diction:

Glorious the misfortune, good the doom,

an altar the grave, for groanings memory,

the grief praise.

There are five sentences here, yet no verb can be seen. Simonides creates a syntax of defiance out of simple apposition, as a painter may set daubs of pure color next to each other on his canvas in the knowledge that they will mix on the retina of your eye.33 The aligned words do not refute or replace one another, they interdepend; the meaning of the sentences happens not outside, not inside the daubs of paint, but between them:

The grave is an altar. …

Neither grave nor altar could be what it is—mean what it means—without the other.³⁴ Visible and invisible lock together in a fact composed of their difference. At the edge where they meet, an area of very bright light is generated and out of the light steps Leonidas (v. 7) as witness of his own fame—“Not perfectly logically,” says Hermann Fränkel in his commentary on this poem, “for the general statement is proved by a reversion to the previous topic as an illustration.”³⁵ Leonidas, then, embodies the not-perfect logic of the whole poem. He stands in apposition to himself. Living and dead at the same time, Leonidas is his own exemplum, an invisible manifestation of the fact that the standard categories into which logic would divide the world are nowhere truly separable. His immortal mortality is a single fact seen from two vanishing points at once, in defiance of the laws of painterly perspective.

The verbal techniques of ἀπάτη with which Simonides conjures Leonidas from death in this poem might well have impressed a Protagoras or a Gorgias.³⁶ But we can distinguish the poet’s intention from the sophists’ in important ways. Gorgias tells us that reality, if it exists at all, is incommunicable and that the function of words is to create an autonomous reality serving the rhetorical needs of the moment.37 Gorgias honors λόγος for its detachment from things and, at the same time, its wily power to dissemble attachment. Simonides, on the other hand, holds λόγος to be εἰκὼν τῶν πραγμάτων, a picture of things; he is not inclined to regard reality as a function of his art nor his art as a manipulation of surfaces. When Simonides composes a poem like his encomium for Leonidas, with its clean machinery of appositions, vanishing points and conceptual shocks, his motive is not rhetorical. He is painting a picture of things that brings visible and invisible together in the mind’s eye as one coherent fact. The coherence is a poetic conjuring, but the fact is not. Together they generate a surplus value that guarantees poetic vocation against epistemological stinginess. To make “paintings that talk” is to engage in a conversation that is more than words and beyond price.

SLEEP

Let us study Simonidean iconology in another, more colorful painting, the famous Danaë fragment. The poem tells the story of Danaë and her infant son Perseus, put to sea in a box because of a sinister prophecy:

ὅτε λάρνακι

ἐν δαιδαλέαι

ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων

κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα δείματι

ἔρειπεν, οὐκ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς

αμϕί τε Пερσέι βάλλε ϕίλαν χέρα

εῖπέν τ᾿· ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον·

σὺ δ᾿ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνῶι

δ᾿ ἤτορι κνοώσσεις

ἐν ἀτερπέι δούρατι χαλκεογόμϕωι

νυκτί τ᾿ ἀλαμπέι

κυανέωι τε δνόϕωι σταλείς·

ἄχναν δ᾿ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν

βαθεῖαν παριόντος

κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις, οὐδ᾿ ἀνέμου

ϕθόγγον, πορϕυρέαι

κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, πρόσωπον καλόν.

εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν,

καί κεν εμῶν ῥημάτων

λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας.

κελομαι δ᾿, εὗδε βρέϕος,

εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω δ᾿ ἄμετρον κακόν·

μεταβουλία δέ τις ϕανείη,

Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο·

ὅττι δὲ θαρσαλέον ἔπος εὔχομαι

ἢ νόσϕι δίκας,

σύγγνωθί μοι.38

[… When

in the painted box—

wind blasting her,

waves going wild,

knocked flat by fear,

her face streaming water,

she put her hand around Perseus and said,

“O child, what trouble I have!

Yet you sleep on soundly,

deep in infant’s dreams

in this bleak box of wood,

nailed together, nightflashing,

in the blue blackness you lie

stretched out.

Waves tower over your head,

water rolls past—you pay no attention at all,

don’t hear the shriek of the wind,

you just lie still in your bright blanket,

beautiful face.

But if to you the terrible were terrible,

you would lend your small ear

to what I am saying.

Ah now, little one, I bid you sleep.

Let the sea sleep,

let the immeasurable evil sleep.

And I pray some difference may come to light

father Zeus, from you!

Yet if my prayer is rude

or outside justice,

forgive me.”]

Throughout the poem Danaë is awake, terrified and talking; the baby is silently, serenely asleep. Simonides has chosen to construct the poem as an alignment of two consciousnesses: one of them is present, active and accessible to us, the other has vanished inwardly.39 One of them is cognizant of the reality that we see stretched out around it, the other is oblivious of that reality and apparently paying attention to something quite different behind its closed eyes.

The difference between their two states of mind is the chief subject of Danaë’s discourse, addressed to the baby (vv. 7–21) as the sea rises around them. Placed exactly at the center of her utterance and her emotion is a contrafactual sentence (vv. 18–20) that operates like a vanishing point for these two perspectives on reality:

But if to you the terrible were terrible

you would lend your small ear

to what I am saying.

In its perfect symmetry, the protasis (εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τὸ γε δεινὸν ἦν) is a picture of the cognitive dissonance that obtains between these two states of mind. The world of Danaë and the world of Perseus are set alongside one another as two different perceptions of the same physical situation, two discrepant definitions of the same word, τὸ δεινὸν, “the terrible.” It is strange to think how such divergence is possible. Where does the baby’s mind go when he is lost in sleep? To judge from his untroubled demeanor, he has gone somewhere more pleasant than the wild sea where his mother is pitching and tossing. Perhaps, as Heraklitos says, “the invisible harmony is better than the visible one,”40 but we do not know that. What we do know, as we stare at this painting, is that Perseus’ state of mind is something as real as his mother’s state of mind, although different and inaccessible. Neither consciousness refutes or replaces the other: they interdepend. They are reciprocally invisible. In Heraklitos’ words, “Men asleep are laborers and coworkers of what is going on in this world.”⁴¹

The meaning of Simonides’ poem is something that happens between the two worlds of waking and sleeping. At vv. 21–22 Danaë repeats the same verb three times: “I bid you, sleep, little one, let the sea sleep, let the immeasurable evil sleep” (v. 22). The next verse is a prayer (μεταβουλία δέ τις ϕανείη, “I pray some difference may come to light,” 23) and out of the prayer steps father Zeus (“Father Zeus, from you,” 24). When Danaë modulates from the second person imperative εὗδε (“sleep, little one”) in v. 21 to the third person imperative εὑδέτω (“let the sea sleep”) in v. 22, she moves from a literal to a figurative register of speech and conjures up the differentiating power of God. Poetic language has this capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep. “If to you the terrible were terrible,” says Danaë to her sleeping child, “you would hear what I am saying.” But the child does not hear and a different kind of sleeping has to be imagined by the wakeful mother. “If to you the invisible were visible,” says Simonides to his audience, “you would see God.” But we do not see God and a different kind of visibility has to be created by the watchful poet. The poet’s metaphorical activity puts him in a contrafactual relation to the world of other people and ordinary speech. He does not seek to refute or replace that world but merely to indicate its lacunae, by positioning alongside the world of things that we see an uncanny protasis of things invisible, although no less real. Without poetry these two worlds would remain unconscious of one another. As Heraklitos says, “All we see awake is death, all we see asleep is sleep.”42 At the vanishing point of metaphor we may catch a glimpse of their differentiation.

To problematize the relation between the worlds of waking and sleeping was a poetic strategy that occurred to Simonides more than once, and fascinated him even outside poetic practice. Xenophon records a dialogue between Simonides and Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, in which they analyze various gradations of pleasure and perception in sleep states and nonsleep states.⁴³ Somewhat more cryptic is a passage from the elegiac corpus of Theognis where Simonides is admonished:

Do not wake one who is sleeping, Simonides,

one whom sweet sleep seizes when he is drunk with wine,

nor bid the wakeful one against his will to go to sleep.

Interpretation of these Theognidean verses remains controversial and it is tempting to dismiss the passage as symposiastic cliché,⁴⁴ but perhaps there is more here than meets the eye. We might again compare Simonides’ thought with Heraklitean usage, where wakefulness is a metaphor for the philosopher’s epistemic distance from a world of sleepwalkers.⁴⁵ These sleepers are the generality of men, who fail to make sense of their experience and live at odds with their own life, lost in what Heraklitos calls “idiot thinking” (ἴδια ϕρόνησις).⁴⁶ Idiot thinking is a matter of mistaking the visible surface of things, the world of appearance and seeming, for the true, underlying, nonapparent λόγος that Heraklitos calls “invisible harmony.”47 In Simonides too we have noticed an attunement to the invisible harmony of things. His poems are paintings of a counterworld that lies behind the facts and inside perceived appearances. There is one striking fragment in which Simonides confesses his commitment to it:

τὸ δοκεῖν καὶ τὰν ἀλάθειαν βιᾶται.⁴⁸

which means something like,

Appearance constrains even truth.

Or we could overtranslate it:

It is in fact upon the world of things needing to be uncovered that the world of merely visible things keeps exerting its pressure.

SEE NOT

Simonides spent his literary as well as his historical life exerting a counterpressure to the claims of the merely visible world. The project is an iconology informing his verse. But a poet’s life is a kind of icon too. When we look more closely at the daubs of paint that compose Simonides’ traditional biography, it is interesting to see, there too, visibles and invisibles in tension or transformation, as if the poet had mixed the colors himself. We have already heard the story of his mnemonic system, whose invention was due to the sudden vanishing of a roomful of people and whose technique was one of visualizing data as faces around a dinner table. We have heard how Simonides kept two large boxes at home: one for visible, the other for invisible χάρις.⁴⁹ It is also recorded that he added a third string to the lyre, devised four new letters for the Greek alphabet and when asked why he had composed an inscription for the paintings of Polygnotos at Delphi, replied, “So that it might be conspicuous that Polygnotos had painted them.”50 There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, “Mecum mea sunt cuncta”: “Everything that is me is with me.”

Finally, God. One day in Syrakuse the tyrant Hieron asked Simonides to define the nature and attributes of divinity. Had the sophist Protagoras been around to hear this question he would have said, “As a matter of fact, nothing can be known about God.” Protagoras would have given two reasons why we cannot know God: namely, the shortness of human life and the invisibility of the subject matter.⁵¹ But Simonides was not so sure. “Give me a day to think about it,” said Simonides to Hieron. After a day Hieron repeated his question. “Give me two days to think about it,” said Simonides to Hieron. Two days later Hieron asked again. “Give me four days to think about it,” said Simonides, and so it continued, exponentially, until at last Hieron demanded an explanation. Whereupon Simonides said, “The longer I ponder the matter, the more obscure it seems to me.”⁵²

Simonides has bequeathed to us in this anecdote a sort of concrete poem of man’s relations with the Godhead. And what we see enacted in the interchange with Hieron is the properly invisible nature of divinity, receding out of our grasp down the lengthening corridor of time and into the darkness at the back of the painting. No trick of perspective, no illusionist sleight-of-hand, can bring God into focus on this canvas.⁵³ Simonides is interested in rendering the fact that ἀλάθεια (truth) cannot be seen in this world, no matter how tyrannical the pressure exerted on it by τὸ δοκεῖν (appearances). The painting he creates is not one that would please a Zeuxis or a Protagoras. Here is a difference of bone structure, not just technique.54 Like the sophist, the illusionist painter defines the world as data and undertakes to enhance our experience of it by perfecting our control of it. He claims to make his audience see, as it were, what is not there. Simonides’ claim is more radical, for it comprehends the profoundest of poetic experiences: that of not seeing what is there.

CELAN

In a curious piece of prose called Conversation in the Mountains,⁵⁵ Celan speaks of visibles, invisibles, alienation, God and sleep. This text invites comparison with Simonides’ whole way of thinking about these matters, but especially with his Danaë poem (fr. 543). Both Celan’s Conversation in the Mountains and Simonides’ Danaë poem are works of indeterminate genre. The Danaë fragment is called a dithyramb by some and a dirge by others. No one is sure of its scansion, colometry or occasion; we owe its preservation to Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who quoted the text without line breaks in order to show that if poetry were written out as prose you couldn’t tell the difference.⁵⁶ Celan’s Conversation in the Mountains, partly based on Büchner’s novella Lenz (as well as on works by Kafka, Buber and Mandelstam), reads like something between a parable and a screenplay. In places its incantatory prose resembles a prayer or a lullaby. Moreover, like Simonides’ poem, Celan’s tale uses sleep as an image of differentiation. For it is the story of a person named Klein who is as lonely as Danaë and longs for conversation, but finds himself facing a world that does not hear him. It is a world “folded over on itself, once and twice and three times.” Klein describes it also as a world of sleepers:

Auf dem Stein bin ich gelegen, damals, du weißt, auf den Steinfliesen; und neben mir, da sind sie gelegen, die andern, die wie ich waren, die andern, die anders waren als ich und genauso, die Geschwisterkinder; und sie lagen da und schliefen, schliefen und schliefen nicht, und sie träumten und träumten nicht, und sie liebten mich nicht und ich liebte sie nicht. …

[On the stone is where I lay, back then you know, on the stone slabs; and next to me they were lying there, the others, who were like me, the others, who were different from me and just the same, the kinsmen; and they lay there and slept, slept and did not sleep, and they dreamt and did not dream, and they did not love me and I did not love them. …]

Celan’s tale tells of Klein taking an evening walk up into the mountains, where he meets his kinsman Gross and attempts to have a conversation. For, like Danaë, neither Klein nor Gross is at home in the silence of nature:

Still wars also, still dort oben im Gebirg. Nicht lang wars still, denn wenn der Jud daherkommt und begegnet einem zweiten, dann ists bald vorbei mit dem Schweigen, auch im Gebirg. Denn der Jud und die Natur, das ist zweierlei, immer noch, auch heute, auch hier.

[So it was quiet, quiet, up there in the mountains. It wasn’t quiet for long because when one Jew comes along and meets another, then goodbye silence even in the mounains. Because the Jew and nature, that’s two very different things, as always, even today, even here.]

Klein goes on to describe a landscape as impressive as the wild sea where Danaë is stranded:

Es hat sich die Erde gefaltet hier oben, hat sich gefaltet einmal und zweimal und dreimal, und hat sich aufgetan in der Mitte, und in der Mitte steht ein Wasser, und das Wasser ist grün, und das Grüne ist weiß, und das Weiße kommt von noch weiter oben, kommt von den Gletschern. …

[Up here the earth has folded over, it’s folded once and twice and three times, and opened up in the middle, and in the middle there’s some water, and the water is green, and the green is white, and the white comes from up further, comes from the glaciers. …]

Celan tells us this landscape is both visible and invisible to Klein. For although Klein “has eyes,” he is separated by “a movable veil” from what is going on in nature, so that everything he sees is “half image and half veil” (halb Bild und halb Schleier). Behind the veil, behind the folded-over surfaces of glaciers, behind the closed eyes of sleepers, lies something Klein cannot see or speak to. Klein feels his separation from the world behind the veil mainly as an incapacity of language:

Das ist die Sprache, die hier gilt, das Grüne mit dem Weißen drin, eine Sprache, nicht für dich und nicht für mich—denn, frag ich, für wen ist sie denn gedacht, die Erde, nicht für dich, sag ich, ist sie gedacht, und nicht für mich—eine Sprache, je nun, ohne Ich und ohne Du, lauter Er, lauter Es, verstehst du, lauter Sie, und nichts als das.

[That’s the kind of speech that counts here, the green with the white in it, a language not for you and not for me—because I’m asking, who is it meant for then, the earth, it’s not meant for you, I’m saying, and not for me—well then, a language with no I and no Thou, pure He, pure It, you see, pure She and nothing but that.]

Language is at issue because conversation, even amid the brutal snags to conversation that both Klein and Danaë experience, is the event that Celan and Simonides want to stage. Why has Klein come up into the mountains? “Because I had to talk, to myself or to you.” What does Danaë beg of her sleeping child? “That you lend your small ear to what I am saying” (19–20). Neither of them finds their way to a satisfactory conversation but both insist on standing in the gap where it should take place, pointing to the lacunae where it burned. No more than Danaë is Klein able to find “speech that counts here.” He cannot talk the language of glaciers, as she cannot speak to sleep or sea. Yet in the absence of a “language with no I and no Thou,” Klein does manage to exchange some “babble” (Geschwätz) with his kinsman Gross. What kind of language is this?

The word Geschwätz is a common German term for everyday chitchat. But Felstiner suggests it may have for Celan “hints of Babel and the loss of original language.” He explains:

For in Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language in General and on the Language of Man,” Geschwätz designates empty speech after the Fall, speech without Adam’s power of naming. … The babbling of Celan’s Jews is a comedown—via the cataclysm that ruined Benjamin—from God-given speech.57

Simonides also dramatizes the problem of naming. As Danaë struggles to find a name for something she knows as τὸ δεινόν (“the terrible”), she produces an anguished tautology (“If to you the terrible were terrible …”) in which the two possibilities of babble and God-given speech stand side by side—the latter hauntingly translated into the former, as it must be here among die Geschwätzigen. We have no other words to use. We know they don’t count but we lay them against the abyss anyway because they are what mark it for us, contrafactually. “There may be, in one direction, two kinds of strangeness next to each other,” said Celan once.⁵⁸ So we see Danaë and her sleeping child aligned in a moment of reciprocal invisibility. Two kinds of strangeness may interdepend, marking the place where babble replaces speech that counts: the green with the white in it. Celan’s tale sends Klein up into the mountains to confront this lacuna, which Celan names Leerstelle (“vacant space” or “empty place”):

Da stehn sie, die Geschwisterkinder, auf einer Straße stehn sie im Gebirg, es schweigt der Stock, es schweigt der Stein, und das Schweigen ist kein Schweigen, kein Wort ist da verstummt und kein Satz, eine Pause ists bloß, eine Wortlücke ists, eine Leerstelle ists, du siehst alle Silben umherstehn; Zunge sind sie und Mund, diese beiden, wie zuvor, und in den Augen hängt ihnen der Schleier. … Die Geschwätzigen!

[There the kinsmen (Klein and Gross) stand, standing on a road in the mountains, the stick is silent, the stone is silent, and the silence is no silence, no word is going mute and no phrase, it’s merely a pause, it’s a word-gap, it’s a vacant space, you can see the syllables all standing around; tongue is what they are and mouth, these two, like before, and the veil is hanging in their eyes. … The babblers!]

The Leerstelle with “syllables all standing around” is an eerie place and has the same effect on Klein as the wild waves do on Danaë. Both of them begin babbling into the void. And then, unexpectedly, stumble up against something else. Not the words they were seeking as a way to penetrate sleep, sea and glacier. Not the listener who will give ear to their words. But something else—something to which (I think) Celan alludes in his “Meridian” speech:

Das ist ein Hinaustreten aus dem Menschlichen, ein Sichhinausbegeben in einen dem Meschlichen zugewandten und unheimlichen Bereich—denselben, in dem die Affengestalt, die Automaten und damit … ach, auch die Kunst zuhause zu sein scheinen.59

[This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm that is turned toward the human, but uncanny—the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them … oh, art too, seem to be at home.]

Both Klein and Danaë address themselves to this uncanny realm and receive no answer at first. “Whoever speaks … no one hears him,” says Klein in some despair. But then into the stupendous unlistening void, Klein and Danaë each hurl an act of strangeness of their own—a poetic act. Danaë flips the verb “sleep” open on a metaphor, leaving behind the literal sleep of her child that she cannot penetrate and moving instead to the register of analogy where all is possible and prayer begins:

κέλομαι δ᾿, εὗδε βρέϕος,

εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω δ᾿ ἄμετρον κακόν.

μεταβουλία δέ τις ϕανείη,

Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο.

[Ah now, little one, I bid you sleep.

Let the sea sleep,

let the immeasurable evil sleep.

And I pray some difference may come to light,

father Zeus, from you!]

Klein, in an equally bold linguistic move, wrests the name of God out of his own post-Adamic babble. The phrase hörst du (“do you hear?”), recurrent in his stuttering exchange with Gross, suddenly takes on a capital letter and rises into Being as Hörstdu (Hearest Thou):

Sagt er, sagt er. … Hörst du, sagt er. … Und Hörstdu, gewiß, Hörstdu, der sagt nichts, der antwortet nicht, denn Hörstdu, das ist der mit den Gletschern, der, der sich gefaltet hat, dreimal, und nicht für die Menschen.60

[Says he, says he. … Do you hear, he says. … And Hearest Thou, of course, Hearest Thou, he says nothing, he doesn’t answer, because Hearest Thou, that’s the one with the glaciers, the one who folded himself over, three times, and not for humans.]

Hörstdu does not respond to Klein’s feat of naming, any more than Zeus answers Danaë’s prayer, but still: the movable veil has moved. Spirit is named in an empty place. It is worth noting that about the time he was writing “Conversation,” Celan bought a book on Martin Buber and underlined the sentences:

Creatures stand within the secret of Creation, of Speech … we can say thou because thou is also said to us. … Spirit is not in the I but between I and Thou.⁶¹

When he aligns “the secret of Creation” with the secret “of Speech,” Buber makes a theoretical point about Spirit that Celan and Simonides prefer to stage as conversation. The point is twofold. For, on the one hand, Spirit does not come from somewhere else, it is already present—invisible—within the elements of speech here in use. At the same time, Spirit does not arise of its own accord, but is wrested from behind the veil by an effort of language between I and Thou. The effort, as Simondes and Celan stage it, is very like a poetic act: reaching right to the edge of ordinary babble, to the place where metaphor waits and naming occurs. This is the act that Simonides calls λὸγος and defines as “a picture of things,” for it contains visibles and invisibles side by side, strangeness by strangeness. It is a word of perfect and radical mimetic economy. From such a word, as Danaë hopes (and the poets confirm), “difference may come to light.”

EN ROUTE

A kind of peace seems to be settling over the end of Simonides’ poem when Danaë repeats the word “sleep” three times as if she were beginning a lullaby. Near the end of Celan’s tale, too, comes a seemingly peaceful allusion, to a “candle burning down,” perhaps a Sabbatic candle.62 What cause for peace? I suppose we could say glaciers, sleep and sea have been confronted; the terrible has (according to our lights) been named; Spirit moved in a place between. Yet neither Simonides nor Celan allows himself to end in peace and Spirit. Both texts recoil on a hard blast of self. Compare Danaë’s final apotropaic cry (“Yet if my prayer is rude or outside justice, forgive me!”) with the last words of Jew Klein:

—Ich hier, ich; ich, der ich dir all das sagen kann, sagen hätt können; der ich dirs nicht sag und nicht gesagt hab; ich mit dem Türkenbund links, ich mit der Rapunzel, ich mit der heruntergebrannten, der Kerze, ich mit dem Tag, ich mit den Tagen, ich hier und ich dort, ich, begletitet vielleicht—jetzt!—von der Liebe der Nichtgeliebten, ich auf dem Weg hier zu mir, oben.

[—I here, I; I, who can say, could have said, all that to you; who don’t say and haven’t said it to you; I with the Turk’s-cap on the left, I with the Rampion, I with what burned down, the candle, I with the day, I with the days, I here and I there, I, companioned perhaps—now!—by the love of those not loved, I on the way to myself, up there.]

Klein is a survivor—small, scrappy, bereft, but awake and en route. Like Danaë, Klein holds his ground in a final gesture of radical individuation. The stubborn loneliness of this scenario seems drawn from a certain conception of the poetic calling that (I think) would have made sense to Simonides, and that Celan describes in the Meridian speech:

Das Gedicht behauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst. … Das Gedicht ist einsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs. Wer es schreibt, bleibt ihm mitgegeben.63

[The poem holds its ground on its own margin. … The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.]

When I reread Simonides’ Danaë fragment with these sentences of Celan in mind, the poem makes sense to me as a picture of the poet’s situation: her loneliness, her marginality, her sense of the relation between visibles and invisibles, her staying power—through catastrophe to metaphor, to naming, to prayer. And yes, her utter wakefulness. Before closing the discussion of Danaë, let us consider one more poem in which Celan chooses imagery of wakefulness and sleep. Because I think this is a poem about the poet’s effort, so beautifully painted for us by Simonides, to “stay with” the poem:

[ALLE DIE SCHLAFGESTALTEN, kristallin,

die du annahmst

im Sprachschatten,

ihnen

führ ich mein Blut zu,

die Bildzeilen, sie

soll ich bergen

in den Schlitzvenen

meiner Erkenntnis—,

meine Trauer, ich seh’s,

läuft zu dir über.64

ALL THOSE SLEEP SHAPES, crystalline,

that you assumed

in the language shadow,

to those

I lead my blood,

those image lines, them

I’m to harbor

in the slit-arteries

of my cognition—,

my grief, I can see,

is deserting to you.]

Perhaps because he is awake among the sleepers, Celan begins on the dark side of words “in the language shadow.” Here he sees shapes that belong to “sleep” and to “you,” which he approaches. They are “crystalline” shapes—interior and elemental designs—which the poet will capture in a picture form or outlines (Bildzeilen) and store in his blood. Blood is also the place where a poet’s understanding takes place (Erkenntnis). To understand and to keep, in however diminished a form, some picture of the inside crystal of things—perhaps what Klein calls “the green with the white in it”—is a poet’s obligation (soll ich) and places him in a certain relation of “I” to “you.” Whoever “you” are, you are placed at the beginning and end of the poem, to enclose the poet in the middle and make his existence possible for him in two essential ways: for you take on shapes that he can understand and you give him a place for his grief.

The poem ends in this place of grief, on an unlikely verb. “My grief, I can see, is deserting to you.” The verb überlaufen means “to well up and run over” (as milk boiling on the stove) or “to rise up and run across” (as desertion). Both its domestic and its military connotations convey an action of displacement—here to there, mine to you—and a mood of error—milk that boils over is lost or spoilt, desertion is a punishable offense. But if these verses do in some part concern the mysterious encounter of I and Thou that gives rise to a poem, why do they choose to represent encounter as transgression or excess, as overflow and misdemeanor? For after all, it is Celan’s stated view that the inception of a poem relies entirely upon this encounter (or the effort toward it). So he says in the Meridian speech:

Das Gedicht will zu einem Andern, es braucht dieses Andere, es braucht ein Gegenüber. Es sucht es auf, es spricht sich ihm zu. Jedes Ding, jeder Mensch ist dem Gedicht, das auf das Andere zuhält, eine Gestalt dieses Anderen.65

[The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.]

Celan sees the poem as heading toward an “other” and the poet as bent on this encounter. He describes the poet’s method (a bit later in the Meridian speech) with the word “attention” (Aufmerksamkeit) and defines attention as “the natural prayer of the soul.”⁶⁶ Let us permit prayer to return us to the analogy with Simonides’ Danaë. Her conversation with an “other,” which shifts its focus from sleeping child to angry sea to Zeus, also ends in prayer. Her prayer, moreover, combines an action of displacement and a mood of error. For she suddenly sees herself “rude and outside justice” and appeals for forgiveness. It is hard to see what excess or transgression she fears to have committed. Could Zeus possibly blame her pain or fault her cry for help? But that is the point. In encounters with Thou, you never know. Who can read the mind of Zeus? It is turned away. The properly invisible nature of otherness guarantees the mystery of our encounters with it, pulls out of us the act of attention that may bring “some difference” to light here. Danaë prays for difference—we all do—without knowing what is entailed in that. When our grief deserts us, where does it go and who will we be without it? These are questions that remain in the empty place where ἀλάθεια (truth) and τὸ δοκεῖν (appearances) lie side by side, strangeness by strangeness, exerting on one another a terrible and sleepless pressure that only the poet attends.

1 Cf. Marx (1867), 1:73, 567–68; Sohn-Rethel (1978), 6.

² See LSJ s.v. and Gernet (1968), 343–47.

³ “It was the persistence of the counterpoised categories, not the ‘true’ nature of the objects that determined classification”: Cohen (1992), 193.

⁴ Gernet (1968), 345.

⁵ Cf. Marx: “Money is the external common medium and faculty for transforming appearance into reality and reality into appearance”: Struik (1964), 153.

⁶ Plutarch Moralia 346–47; see also 17–18, 58b. The comparison between poetry and painting figures in the theoretical discourse of the author of the Dissoi logoi 3.10; Plato Republic 605a; Cratylus 425a, 430b–e, 432d; Aristotle Poetics 47a, 50a, 50b, 54b, 60b; Horace Ars poetica 361–65; Cicero Disputationes Tusculanae 5.39.114; Longinus De sublimitate 17.20; Dio Chrysostom Olympics 12; Augustine In Ioannis Evangelium 24.2; Leonardo da Vinci Treatise on Painting; McMahon (1956), 11–21; and surfaces regularly in the arguments of later aestheticians from Lessing (1766) to McLuhan (1968). Secondary discussions include Alpers (1972); Atkins (1934); Bell (1978); Brink (1971); Burke (1757); Dorsch (1977); Du Bos (1740); Hagstrum (1958); Harriott (1969); Hazlitt (1844); Hermeren (1969); Lee (1940); Markiewicz (1987); Panofsky (1939); Schapiro (1973); Thayer (1975); Trimpi (1973); Uspensky (1972); Van Hook (1905); Wellek (1942); Wimsatt (1954); Wolfe (1975).

⁷ Longinus De sublimitate 15.7.

⁸ Pausanias tell us of the Polygnotan inscription (10.25.1), while Plutarch cites Simonides as an authority on the paintings in the town hall at Phlya (Life of Themistokles 1.4). Simonides also found occasion to mention, in a now-unknown context, a painter of Rhegium named Sillax (fr. 634 PMG).

⁹ Michael Psellos fr. 821 Migne.

¹⁰ Pliny Natural History 35.29. See further Bruno (1977), 1–30; Keuls (1978), 3, 58–61; Robertson (1959), 111–36; Swindler (1929), 196–236.

¹¹ Keuls (1978), 2–5, 58–65; Gombrich (1968), 40.

¹² Holt (1957), 1:277.

¹³ Plato Republic 599a; Sophist 234, 266c7–9.

¹⁴ On the relation Plato discerned or thought he discerned between poetry and sophistry, see Robinson (1987), 259–66.

¹⁵ Fr. 3.10 VS. Cf. the author’s citations from Aiskhylos (3.12) and Kleoboulinos (3.11); Plato Republic 596d–e. See further Freeman (1946), 417–19; Rosenmeyer (1965), 234; Robinson (1987).

¹⁶ Fr. B23 VS = Plutarch Moralia 348c; cf. Gorgias fr. B11.17–18 VS.

¹⁷ Even Homer’s Zeus resorts to a silent nod of the head when he wishes to make an “undeceiving” (οὐδ᾿ ἀπατηλὸν, Iliad 1.526) assertion, while Hesiod’s Muses exult in their authority over truth and lies at once (Theogony 27): cf. Homeric Hymn to Hermes 4.560–63; Solon fr. 29 West; Parmenides fr. B8.50–52; B19 VS. Further on ἀπάτη, see Bell (1978), 81–82; Christ (1941), 41–48; Detienne (1981), 106–43; Heinimann (1945), 39–47; Hoffman (1925); Van Groningen (1948), 1–7; Luther (1935), 80–92; Pohlenz (1920), 169; Rosenmeyer (1965), 227–30; Rostagni (1922), 78; Snell (1926), 355–69; Suss (1910), 52–60; Untersteiner (1949), 1.184–85; 2.68.

¹⁸ Guthrie (1969), 3.42–45.

¹⁹ Fr. B11.8–14 VS; Plato Philebus 58a–b.

²⁰ Plato Protagoras 316d; Christ (1941), 41; Rosenmeyer (1965), 233; Thayer (1975), 10; Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1913), 141.

²¹ In an anecdote (whose structure and tone may suggest the usage was already commonplace) Plutarch records that, when asked why he did not bother “to deceive the Thessalians,” Simonides replied, “The Thessalians are too stupid to be deceived by me” (Plutarch Moralia 15d). We should note, but not concede, Wilamowitz’s claim that the witticism is too natty for Simonides and deserves transfer to Gorgias: (1913), 143.

²² On sophistic appraisal of the value of poetry, see Gomme (1954), 55–78; Jaeger (1945) 1.296; Pohlenz (1920), 162–63, 178; Webster (1939), 171; Woodbury (1953), 137.

²³ Frr. B23 and B11.9 VS; cf. Plato Gorgias 502c.

²⁴ Fr. B28 VS. The Gorgian attribution is disputed: see Freeman (1946), 366; but the thought seems in no way foreign to a fifth-century intellectual mood typified by Gorgias.

²⁵ Plato Theatetus 167b; McMahon (1956), 90.

²⁶ Pliny Natural History 35.66; cf. Plato Republic 598c.

²⁷ Protagoras fr. A3 VS.

²⁸ The backsprung bow is a figure introduced by Simonides’ contemporary, the philosopher Heraklitos, in a controversial fragment. “They do not understand how that which differs is of one sense with itself: backstretched (παλίντονος [or “backward turning,” reading παλίντροπος]) harmony as of a bow or a lyre” (fr. B51 VS), says Heraklitos, apparently describing both the syntax of human life and the method of his own sentences. G. S. Kirk explains the Heraklitean bow as “a connexion working in both directions … which operates simultaneously in contrary ways and is only maintained so long as each tension exactly balances the other”: (1954), 203. There is no ancient gossip associating the two thinkers, and I do not mean to imply that Simonides studied Heraklitos, yet one cannot but be struck by similarities of metaphysic and of technique. Cf. note 20 above, and see further below.

²⁹ Sullivan (1980), 33.

³⁰ Rosenmeyer (1965), 229. On the Heraklitean sentence, see further Hoffman (1925); Robinson (1987), 261; Snell (1926), 368–70.

³¹ Herodotos 7.228.

³² Simonides fr. 531 PMG.

³³ Cf. Plato Crito 107d. That this phenomenon was known to ancient painters under the name σκιαγραϕία is the hypothesis of Keuls (1975); (1978), 60–61.

³⁴ With this notably relational conception of how language operates we might compare the attitude of the historical Simonides to slander. Stobaios records that, when a friend told Simonides that he was hearing much bad talk about him, the poet replied, “Will you not stop defaming me with your ears!” (2.42).

³⁵ Fränkel (1973), 320.

³⁶ Cf., e.g., Gorgias fr. B82.13 VS.

³⁷ Frr. B3, B82.8 VS.

³⁸ Simonides fr. 543 PMG.

³⁹ Perhaps Simonides’ acclaimed ability to arouse τὸ σύμπαθες (Vita Aeschyli 8; Dionysios of Halikarnassos De oratoribus veteribus 420 Reiske; Quintilian Institutio oratoria 10.1.64) can be understood as a similar action of alignment that, by positioning one πάθος alongside (συν) another, discovers sympathy between them. Insofar as λόγος is εἰκών, he paints an etymology of emotion.

⁴⁰ Fr. B54 VS.

⁴¹ Fr. B75 VS.

⁴² Fr. B21 VS.

⁴³ Xenophon Hieron 1.6.

⁴⁴ Theognis 469–71. Carrière does not address vv. 469–71 separately but alludes to the preceding verses as “précepte de l’hospitalité antique”: (1962), 49.

⁴⁵ Cf. Heraklitos frr. B1, 21, 26, 71, 75, 88, 89 VS; Kahn (1979), 99, 213–16, 255, 294; Marcovich (1967), 10, 245; Fink and Heidegger (1979).

⁴⁶ Fr. B2 VS.

⁴⁷ Fr. B54; cf. B56VS.

⁴⁸ Simonides fr. 598 PMG. The sentence is cited without attribution by Plato (Republic 364) as if it constituted an argument for specious virtue. In the absence of any original context for the fragment, it is hard to know how tendentious Plato’s reading is. On Simonides misrepresented by Plato, see Bell (1978), 77–81; Woodbury (1953).

⁴⁹ See above. Scholia ad Theokritos 16; Stobaios 3.10.39; Plutarch Moralia 520a.

⁵⁰ Plutarch Moralia 438b.

⁵¹ Cf. fr. B4 VS.

⁵² “Quia quanto diutius considero tanto mihi res videtur obscurior”: Cicero De natura deorum 1.22.

⁵³ Cf. Heraklitos: “Nature loves to hide itself” (ϕύσις κρυπτέσθαι ϕιλεῖ B123 VS).

⁵⁴ “If you call painting mute poetry, you might as well call poetry blind painting,” Leonardo says tartly in his Treatise; McMahon (1956), 29; Markiewicz (1987), 338.

⁵⁵ Celan (1990), 23–29; Felstiner (1995), 141–44; Waldrop (1986), 17–22.

⁵⁶ Dionysios of Halikarnassos De compositione verborum 26.

⁵⁷ Felstiner (1995), 145.

⁵⁸ Speech on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize, Darmstadt, 22 October 1960: “The Meridian”: Celan (1990), 40–62; Waldrop (1986), 37–55.

⁵⁹ Celan (1990), 47; Waldrop (1986), 42–43.

⁶⁰ Celan (1990), 26; Waldrop (1986), 20.

⁶¹ Concerning the influence of Buber’s “Gespräch in den Bergen” (1913) on Celan’s “Gespräch im Gebirg” (1960), see Felstiner (1995), 140–44; and Lyon (1971), 110–20.

⁶² Celan describes a candle lit by “our mother’s father”; Felstiner reads it as an image of candles lit by a mother to mark the end of one week and the beginning of the next: (1995), 145.

⁶³ Celan (1990), 55; Waldrop (1986), 49.

⁶⁴ Celan (1983), 3:79; (1988), 336–37.

⁶⁵ Celan (1990), 55; Waldrop (1986), 49.

⁶⁶ “If you allow me a quote from Malebranche via Walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka”: Celan (1990), 56; Waldrop (1986), 50.