John Felstiner, Paul Celan meets Samuel Beckett
'Celan me dépasse', Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, "Celan leaves me behind." But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett's trilogy opens with a mother's death and ends with The Unnamable's last words: "in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Six years before his suicide by drowning, Paul Celan had written this poem:
Where?
At night in crumbling rockmass.
In trouble's rubble and scree,
in slowest tumult,
the wisdom-pit named Never.
Water needles
stitch up the split
shadow — it fights its way
deeper down,
free.
Since "shadow" is masculine in German, maybe those final lines are saying, "he fights his way / deeper down, / free."'