Abend Der Worte

“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.

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.