Praise for Under the Dome:"Daive's memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death. 'He loves words,' Daive writes, recalling the two of them working together on translations in Celan’s apartment. 'He erases them as if they should bleed.' … The best way to approach Celan’s poetry may be, in Daive’s words, as a 'vibration of sense used as energy'—a phenomenon that surpasses mere comprehension."—Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker"[Under the Dome] is as valuable for its insights into Celan the man as for the light it sheds on his later ars poetica."—Times Literary Supplement"The dome of Daive's title is the foliage of Paris, especially of the area around the École Normale, where Celan taught. The book, which appeared in French in 1996, records conversations that are literary and philosophical rather than confessional, and Daive writes of the 'charm' of Celan’s distance. But we get quite a few glimpses of the agitations of Celan’s later life: a 'failed suicide,' an arrest leading to a period in a psychiatric hospital, the last days of his marriage to Gisèle Lestrange, his death in the Seine."—Michael Wood, London Review of Books"[Under the Dome's] form aptly mirrors Celan's own: it is composed in short fragments, its style is hallucinatory and obsessive. … And though it is steeped in melancholy, the memoir also shows Celan absorbed in the quiet happiness of his work. Daive watches from a distance and leaves him undisturbed."—Boston Review"[E]vocative portrait of the relationship between two significant figures in [France] … In this narrative on poetry and philosophy, on Kafka and God, on the challenge and futility of using words to express what words cannot express: 'The matter of words. Words as matter. Distance within logic.' … it's a book that will appeal most to fans of either poet’s work and one that could find a home in courses on modern French literature."—Kirkus Reviews"Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Daive into English succeeds unequivocally. She manages at once to echo Daive’s French and find the resonance of Daive’s own echo of Celan’s singular German. This is no easy task. … If we conceive of Daive’s original Sous la coupole as a collaboration between two authors, then Waldrop’s quiet presence in Under the Dome expands that collaboration to a work of three. … In this respect, Under the Dome is instructive not only for poets or translators, but for readers, for those of us who also seek connections between words and the world around us."—Reading in Translation"Daive offers a curbside view of Celan's behaviors. Written two decades after Celan's suicide, Daive’s lyrical fragments drift among the cafés and streets of Paris, and are oriented through his engrossed attention to Celan’s complex mind … The two stroll down Boulevard Saint-Michel, cross Boulevard Saint-Germain, and then move onto Place de la Contrescarpe, a square in the city’s Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lived and where chestnut and paulownia trees lined the street. 'These trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative—dome' which inspires the book’s title. Yet such walks could be painful for Celan … But there are also moments of levity and wonder."—On the Seawall"The book is much more than a recounting or memoire. Rather, it is an evocation of a significant period in both poets' lives, rich in subtle detail and sentiment. … Daive builds his book from this shared history. Doing so, he tracks in Celan a kind of revelatory attentiveness that Celan’s poems embody, the former feeding the latter and vice versa. … For readers of Paul Celan in English, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is a touchstone. For readers unfamiliar with Celan, I suggest they read this book after encountering Celan’s poetry, especially in the English translations by Pierre Joris. And then, of course, the pleasure is yours."—Allan Graubard, Leonardo Reviews"As we follow along with Daive and Celan wandering about Paris like two walking enigmas struck by mutual recognition of the value each of them has to offer the other, the streets, parks, and squares the two meet in and stroll through come to life, with the city playing a central role throughout. Not only providing the physical setting for the scenes of the poets' meetings, but also serving metaphorically for the shelter, literal 'dome', under which their exchanges occurred; permanently stamping Celan's haunting presence upon Daive’s imagination. … Daive and Celan clearly shared a peculiar closeness, one that refuses the professional, yet also resists being entirely personal. Yet it was decidedly poetic—endlessly and compellingly exploring as it does, in poet Robert Duncan’s words, 'the sounds and silences of language' where 'creativity in language works.'"—Parick James Dunagan, Caesura"Jean Daive's memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confrère of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century."—J.M. Coetzee"An intimate portrait in fragments? An utterly singular memoir? An essay in poetics? A poem in prose? All these and more. This fluid and indefinable work by Jean Daive has never been far from my thoughts since I first read it decades ago. It breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human necessity of poetry. Now, we are fortunate once again to have available Rosmarie Waldrop’s pitch-perfect translation in this most welcome new edition."—Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx"'The world always remembers poetry,' says Celan in this staggering epic of talking and silence and walking and translating at tables. It is his poetry that is indeed remembered, however we in the world come to it. The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering of Jean Daive’s prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop, grab on and leave us haunted and speechless."—Mary Ann Caws, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry"Written in the rhythm of walking, and in the very particular rhythm of walking beside Paul Celan, this stunning book-length prose-poem honors not only the great Romanian-born poet but also the life-long love affair with the word that poetry requires. One of the most important poets of post-WWII France, Daive alone has the consummate sensitivity and mastery of nuance needed to make Celan present again and to evoke the rich background of time and place that allows the story to attain its proper historic proportions. Rosmarie Waldrop's brilliant translation resonates with her profound knowledge of both Celan's and Daive's poetry and the passion for language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful collaboration."—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On"'We never talk about Paul Celan,' certainly not as is done in Under the Dome. In this gem of a poetic memoir, we are as close to breathing and metabolizing the stubborn silences of Paul Celan as it is possible to do so while honoring his life and art. 'Would you translate me?' becomes the code and kernel from which the infinity of Paul Celan’s tragic genius unfolds. How else to talk, sing, or communicate with Paul Celan—who died trying to unpave the road on which the ineffable treads—if not through unraveling language? If Paul Celan’s life force is genomic, or elemental, it replicates and transfers itself through us like a Spinozan miracle. Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celan’s question to Jean Daive as her own. I cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that contends with time."—Fady Joudah, author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance"The republication of this arresting translation of Jean Daive's writing about his conversations and encounters with Paul Celan lets us imagine the space and time of Celan's words as they were uttered on the streets of Paris, in its cafes, under the trees, and by the river. Daive's writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celan's various enunciations, his linguistic humility. Yet the words sometimes break free of any context, lingering in a separate space on the page; they follow lived memory, the well-worn interruptions whose repetition finds no resolution. Daive offers small stories, but mainly fragments that follow one another in the wake of the destruction of narrative flow; the tenses change suddenly, putting into a shifting modality of writing a complex memory that refuses to leave a friend. Celan’s death, what Daive calls 'really unforeseeable,' remains as an 'undercurrent' in the conversations recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of true mourning and acknowledgement."—Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

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INTRODUCTION "With Paul Celan" In this centenary year of his birth—lamentably also the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide—City Lights makes a special contribution to the ongoing international commemorations of Celan with a new edition of Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, luminously translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop.  City Lights’ re-publication of Daive’s superb book, whose point of departure is the experience of two poets translating one another, stands as a kind of recursive poetic justice, for City Lights was the first press here in our Americas to issue a book of poetry featuring translations of Celan.  Recounting the earlier history that brought this poetry to Western-Hemisphere audiences allows us to appreciate how Daive’s work likewise helped foster engagements with Celan’s art that mattered—that continue to matter—on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. In Winter 1957–58, The Hudson Review published Jerome Rothenberg’s translations of seven poems by the German-Jewish poet Erich Kästner, who had somehow survived the Third Reich while remaining in Germany throughout the Hitler period.  Alongside his translations, The Hudson Review also published Rothenberg’s commentary about the poems’ dissident, biting, cabaret-satire form. City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, seeing the work in The Hudson Review, quickly proposed that Rothenberg edit a volume of contemporary German poetry for the press.  New Young German Poets—translated, edited, and introduced by Rothenberg—appeared in 1959 as Pocket Poets Series Number Eleven.  Shortly before the volume issued, Robert Bly’s magazine The Fifties ran three selections from a larger set of Rothenberg translations: renderings into English of an astonishing German-language poet named Paul Celan, one of the “new young German poets” about to receive wider American attention via City Lights (though it should be observed that, at 39, Celan didn’t deem himself young, nor had the Rumanian-born, now-French-citizen Celan ever been German).  Among the 10 artists Rothenberg presented in New Young German Poets were the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann; Günter Grass; Hans Magnus Enzensberger; and Celan, “regarded by many,” Rothenberg noted, “as the greatest of the post-war poets in Germany, perhaps in Europe.”  Celan had the most poems in the volume, including “Corona,” “Shibboleth,” and of course, “Death Fugue” (which had appeared, as translated by the art critic Clement Greenberg, in the March 1955 issue of the then-still-progressive Commentary).  Rothenberg’s prefatory remarks to New Young German Poets stressed the importance of the poetry’s emergence from fascism, the national-socialist genocide, and their Cold-War aftermaths. In fact, these “new young” poets were not simply a next generation of German poetry; any such continuity had been broken by the war and genocide, even when the postwar “economic miracle” seemed to make the catastrophic past decades disappear. The poets Rothenberg selected had ambivalent relationships to the new West Germany, often living beyond its borders and feeling themselves, as Enzensberger wrote to Rothenberg, “fremde”—strangers, aliens, outsiders—within “the forlorn society of todays [sic] Western Germany, which lives in terms of consumption substituted for freedom, of power and defence hysteria, etc.” New Young German Poets was well positioned to reach readers and makers of poetry in both direct and roundabout ways. Audiences (primarily in the U.S., but likewise in Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America) who made a habit of getting hold of and sharing City Lights books included poets associated with the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, and New York School groups, as well as those connected to the Objectivist project.  The connections stretched further: by the early 1970s, for example, Savacou: A Journal of the Caribbean Artists Movement (founded and edited by the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and colleagues) published poet and theatre director Alex Gradussov’s rendering of “Death Fugue” into an English that aimed to reach Antillean readers, in a special issue that honored one of the key figures of Caribbean writing and activism, Frank Collymore. Meanwhile, in an overlapping time-signature, through the translations in Rothenberg’s own new magazine Poems from the Floating World, as well as those published in New Young German Poets, Robert Duncan was introduced to Celan, an encounter that deepened through the years. By the mid- to late 1970s, that encounter had generated Duncan’s “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings.” Rothenberg’s early work on New Young German Poets led him into a special trajectory at once generous and dedicated to genuine explorations of collective human experience in its diversity; he’s often looked back on what he’s called his ever-increasing understanding of importance of meeting and talking with Celan when serving with the US Army in West Germany in 1953–54.  Rothenberg has always emphasized the significance, to any consequential poetics, of translation. This is to say that Rothenberg had imagined from the get-go a “globalism” that, far from imposing a worldwide standardizing equivalence onto all literary, aesthetic, and cultural objects, had instead would seek “not an everywhere that was nowhere but an everywhere made up of many somewheres.” Midway through the decade when New Young German Poets first circulates across the Americas—as the world itself convulses in what becomes known as “the ’60s”—Celan, home in Paris, meets the young, unpublished French poet and translator of German-language poetry, Jean Daive.  Celan asks Daive to translate some of his poetry; Daive agrees. Composed about 20 years later and published in 1996—as the fifth volume in Daive’s continuing series-project La Condition d’infini (The Infinite Condition)—Sous la coupole hauntingly traces in elliptical concentric circles the two poet-translators’ working relationship and friendship that lasted from 1965 until Celan’s April 20, 1970 suicide.  In the mode or form of temporal recurrence or echo, musical theme and variation; in movements that seem never to have started from any single defined point of origin but that course like memory waves: we read and and hear, once and again—yet differently, even when incidents and occasions might appear the same—of their innumerable work sessions, often a return in remembered-time to the same session.  The echoes are not only of what’s already come, in Under the Dome, but of many of the Celan poems necessarily folded into the book’s music-like memory-structure. Indeed, the connections between this very iterative movement and translation itself are enacted as, into, Daive’s poetics.  We read of work sessions that are followed by…walks and talks; coffees followed or preceded by…walks and talks; dinners that come after yet still precede more…walks and talks; and—sometimes, just simply—walks and talks.  With silence a crucial component of what it means to walk, to talk, to put the two into relation.  World and poetry too are distinct, with the how? of their mutual engagement an ever-present question. “His silence is an electric switch,” Daive writes of Celan, a switch, because it changes the direction of the electrical current.  Celan’s relationship to current speech is that of a “commutateur”: his silences change the direction (sens)—and the sense (sens)—of communication. The “dome” of the book’s title refers in the first place to the shade-shelter formed by the trees’ foliage, the “foliage” that, in French and German, among other languages, yields terms that can signify “leaf” or “page”: feuille; Blatt.  The trees—primarily chestnut and paulownia—that populate the Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris’ Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lives, and in whose streets and cafés Celan and Daive delight to stroll, to think aloud, to work: these trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative—dome.  The leafy dome of the Contrescarpe becomes one of those particularized “somewheres” that together make up the collective yet differentiated “everywhere” Rothenberg refers to above.  Here, it emerges as the singular encounter that the two poets and their two-and-more languages produce, whose feuilles and Blätter are now, via the inevitable Whitmanian pun, projecting their shadows in English.  “The secret is in these leaves,” Waldrop translates, echoing in a minor key the opening of Leaves of Grass: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” Daive and Celan’s walks are quite different from Whitman’s loafing; the American poet’s confidence that the pages of the poem might successfully gloss the leaves of the world has notably withered.  And yet, Celan himself recognized how his own view that there is “no basic difference between a poem and a handshake” resonated with Whitman’s assertion, “Camerado, this is no book,/ who touches this touches a man”—a transatlantic solidarity that runs all the deeper for the spectral quality of these person-to-person contacts. Another of those lines from Leaves of Grass: “Have you practiced so long to learn to read?”  Our experience, of reading—and reading the “reading-matter” of all kinds in the somewheres that make up everywhere—announces itself as our co-participation in Under the Dome’s initial moment when we read (in our first encounter with this book, and with Celan) about Celan reading in order to engage what’s known—or not known, or not yet known—of the world: No matter whom, no matter what, Paul Celan reads no matter where because the word drives him to memory and is the imaginary space where the legibility of the world is acted out… The world is illegible and the mater of words engenders a structure: the poem. Vibration of sense used as energy… He reads the newspapers, all of them…. posters, catalogues, dictionaries and philosophy… He reads Rilke, Trakl, Kafka, Heidegger. Listens to conversations, notes a word heard in a store, in the street… The matter of words. Words as matter… Reading Daive or Celan could never be described as “a walk in the park”—not for readers of French and German, and not even for the two poets themselves, who read each other between such strolls.  English-reading audiences have had access, periodically, to parts of Daive’s oeuvre; a good deal more of it has appeared as the result of a number of co-translations he and the Canadian-U.S. poet Norma Cole have done of one another’s work during the last decade. Celan’s presence in English goes further back but the trials of his translators have not ceased to be daunting. So there’s an almost perfect bookending—though happily, not an ending—to what’s set in motion in 1959 by New Young German Poets when we remark that, since at least the early 1990s, Rothenberg’s collaborator on the ongoing anthology-series Poems for the Millennium has been the French-born, Luxembourg-raised poet and translator Pierre Joris, who’s moved among Europe, North Africa, and the U.S. for the better part of six decades, prolifically translating among French, German, English, Arabic, and other languages.  A crucial portion of Joris’ work has involved bringing more and more of Celan’s poetry and critical writing closer to the kind of English translations they demand. No one’s expressed that judgment better than Mary Ann Caws: “Without simplifying, aiming at anything elegantly ‘poetic,’ or condensing Celan’s anxiously layered otherness, Joris has gotten right to its grayness, what Celan calls ‘the darkness of the poem today… a language fragment… freighted with world.’” That the fragments of language themselves—the splintered syntax and fractured words—bear the world as their freight is a lesson that Rosmarie Waldrop’s own attentive efforts to transport Daive’s words into English helps us understand.  When the text turns to Daive’s own experience translating Celan’s German into French, Waldrop has the unenviable job of translating the translation, with all the possible losses such a layering implies.  In such a situation, does the translator return to “the original,” working from the German verse that Daive had himself translated into French?  Or is the origin no longer unambiguously Celan, such that the English translation should heed the diction and syntax of Daive’s French, irrespective of its German precedent?  And, whatever she decides, how might the translator signal the difference, her choice and its alternative?  Waldrop faces such hard decisions several times in Under the Dome, and the variety in her choice of solutions illuminates the world with which this poetry is freighted.  Thus, when reckoning with Daive’s translation of the 1959 poem “Engführung,” Waldrop replaces the title of Daive’s translation with Celan’s original German.  When Daive quotes from his own translation, reprinting its opening verses “Dé – porté dans l’étendue,” Waldrop does not return to the German text from which Daive is translating, nor does she translate Daive’s French into English.  Daive’s translation is left untranslated.  If Under the Dome is indeed “translated from the French,” then “Dé – porté dans l’étendue” is either untranslatable, or it isn’t French. A “language fragment… freighted with world”: Mary Ann Caws’ praise for Pierre Joris’s translation work cites a note Celan made about how the poem comes to us today. It comes “freighted” (“befrachtet”): loaded, as one loads a train car with merchandise.  “Freighted with world” is ironic, dark, and less metaphorical than one would think, since, although en route, the merchandise’s eventual exchangeability is in question, the translatability of the world uncertain.  “Dé – porté” is already one of these language fragments, a word that Daive splits in two and disposes like the linked wagons of a freight train.  As the translation of the lines “Verbracht ins/ Gelände”—which Michael Hamburger renders as “Brought into /the terrain”—Daive’s “Dé – porté dans l’étendue” was subjected to fierce critique when it was first published in the Mercure de France in 1971 because of its violent treatment of the word “verbracht,” a participle that usually denotes a passage of time and that commands the sense of “déporté” (deported) only in the reports of a bureaucrat. Technically, “verbracht” does not count among the many “Komposita” that Celan threads through his poetry, and yet Daive’s translation reads it as such a composite, breaking it down and translating the fragments piecemeal: “ver-” (dé-), “-bracht” (-porté).  Of course, parsing “ver-bracht” as “dé-porté” makes plain the history which Celan’s poem leaves implicit: in French, “la déportation” refers explicitly to the German-operated network of freight trains that carried Jews like Celan’s parents to their deaths in concentration camps.  As Waldrop translates, “my parents died deported.” How, then, to translate Daive’s “Dé – porté”?  Certainly, the cognate “deported” or “de – ported” offers itself.  Less historically specific than “déporté,” “deported” expands the range of reference, opening the poem onto a longer, ongoing history of state violence.  But it forgoes the gamble of Daive’s direct invocation of the genocide, a roll of the “die” (dé) which risks losing the German to name the vanished world with which that language is nonetheless freighted.  Violently glossing the historical rupture by which the euphemistic, Eichmanian “verbracht” became, in effect, an other German—a lexeme in what Victor Klemperer called the Lingua Tertii Imperii—Daive’s French bears witness to the loss of Celan’s mother tongue, pointing to the unsayable difference that distinguishes the language he shared with his mother (verbracht) from the language in which her murder was commissioned (ver-bracht). That the repetition of this loss is what is at stake in the translation is evident from Daive’s recollection of the “violent stroke across the paper” with which Celan sanctions Daive’s solution. Under the Dome is full of such convulsive motions: lightning flashes, the gambler throws the dice, the engraver defaces the plate, and the poem, we learn, “crosses out the world.” By courting destitution, however, all of these gestures refer us back to this paradoxical movement of (self-)translation, whereby Celan “authorizes” his poem’s exile into French and thus becomes the “author” of his own linguistic dispossession.  “Have you ever thought of writing in another language?… Yes, sometimes, in French… But it is not possible.”  What is not possible in writing, however, may be possible in translation.  Contrary to received wisdom, translation can have a generative relationship to its alleged impossibility.  Here, for instance, the impossibility of writing in French opens up the singular possibility of mourning the loss of German in the translation. And in English?  It tells us a lot about the layers of language and memory that make up Under the Dome’s vault that Waldrop declines to translate “Dé – porté dans l’étendue” as she translates the rest of Daive’s French.  Here, Daive does more than transmit the sense of “Verbracht ins/ Gelände”; the violent dislocation of French morphology bears the trace of the crime—“das Verbrechen”—that echoes in the German.  Waldrop, translating the French, is thus justified in leaving this language fragment “in the original,” since this French is not only French.  It is freighted with Celan’s German, which, though deported into French, retains its “unmistakable trace.” Le verbe n’est plus. Le monde n’est plus (fort). Il faut que je te porte.   Lines which Waldrop translates as The word is no more, The world is no more (no stronger). I have to carry you. The withdrawal of the word and the world has obvious Biblical overtones, but, in this translated memoire of translation especially, the absence of “verbe” and “monde” resonates plainly with the task of the translator (the two notes are not unrelated: in Celan’s Bible, we learn, the seventh day is set aside for translation). Compounded across the sequence of translation, however, the absence of the word is strangely amplified.  The original’s disappearance in the translation is recalled explicitly in Daive’s “Le monde n’est plus (fort),” which appends the missing “fort” (gone) from “Die Welt ist fort” to the end of the French translation.  Of course, Daive’s “fort” does not actually bring back Celan’s word—it does not restore Celan’s “Wort”—though it may give French the strength to bear that loss.  Translation implies loss, always; the real question is, how does the translation carry its losses?  Paradoxically, a translation grows stronger as a translation for coming to terms with what cannot be retrieved. Waldrop’s translation does just this, summoning the strength to carry the vanished world Under the Dome by acknowledging its powerlessness to do so. Her translation hears in Daive’s “(fort)” not just the German adjective predicating absence (fort) but the French adjective signifying strength (fort).  But “strong” is neither “fort” nor “fort.”  This strength too is fortified with its own absence.  The translation’s strength rests on nothing in the world.  “The world is no more (no stronger).” That strength: Celan and Daive periodically chuckle, with varying degrees of irony and bemusement during their walking-talking (their acts of regarding, reading, translating)—that the name for one of those trees whose overhanging leaves “dome” them—paulownia—echoes and is echoed by the names of a cast of characters who star in a partly literal, part-metaphorically-extended family drama contracted to play, Night and Day, on and around the Place de la Contrescarpe.  There, beneath those paulownias, we discover at least three Pauls: Celan himself; Daive’s mother Paula; and other Paulas further back in Daive’s family line, whose literal and metaphorically paved-over histories of violence (the family business was the laying of paving stone that would—as the expression goes—cover things up) underlies one layer of what the 24-year-old Daive, meeting the 45-year-old Celan, has been trying to come to terms with.  Daive has been attempting to move from a gnawing past trauma that, he hints, involved the suffering of incestuous abuse, towards something like a whited-out version of it—but with the notion of groping his way towards what can begin to be named, counted, known: toward what may still look blank, blanché, but might also begin to reveal its score, its number, its decimal place, its value or meaning.       Davie’s supercharged receptivity to Celan—to the person, the poet and his poetry, the history the poetry takes in and makes audible, visible, sensed—is clearly, to Celan, exceptional.  Elliptically at first, and then with the clarity of more resonant echoings, Under the Dome lets us know that Daive becomes exponentially more aware of how his struggle to gain further capacity to see that whited-out decimal place of suffering, is being inked-in by his habitual viewing of what’s seemingly ever-present beneath Celan’s fingernails.  For Celan’s nails are often—are usually—“black with earth beneath them.”  Celan “digs” his way across the Contrescarpe and Paris itself; his digging gives us, Daive indicates, not only the poems, but what we’ll finally take away as the earth-materials, the matter of time or history: Celan’s; Daive’s; that of the poems they write and translate, the poetic and sociopolitical histories they share—all of it finally formed into Under the Dome. As he does throughout the book with other recurrent and correlated motifs, Daive is here re-sounding a particular Celan poem, one that, not so coincidentally, concerns poetry’s need to risk precisely the danger that conveying brutal subject matter inescapably conjoins with the rush of “getting” what the poem unearths that we need to know.  For the particular poem in question is “There was Earth Inside Them, and/they dug” (“Er war Erde in Ihnen, und/sie gruben”), one of Celan’s greatest poems, a kind of sibling of “Death Fugue,” whose final stanza—emerging from what’s been the maddening-deadly digging of beings all too clearly reminiscent of slave laborers—walks the tightrope of appearing to mute the vast brutality that is its subject matter, simply by seeming to extend through or past that brutality with lines as devastatingly beautiful as any in modern poetry.  The poem’s final stanza begins with a line whose song sounds out from realms that seems always to have been singing before we ever arrived on the scene, on any scene: O one, o none, o no one, o you [O einer, o keiner, o niemand, o du]: Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? O you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you, And on our finger awakes the ring. What’s the price of digging up truths that emerge only with such digging, and of having made and shared the song, the lyric music that cuts into torture-filled earth to emerge singing? I have hidden the blood. What do you think? I have paid… I have paid… —I have hidden the madness… My poetry masks the madness… So Daive quotes Celan murmuring, in the act of painful reflection, in a kind of self-torture that makes the word ambivalent utterly inadequate.  This acknowledgment counts as among Under the Dome’s most searing, honest, ambiguous moments.  Song of such caliber is what digs up “dust,” “sand,” what Celan calls “the thorn” that, among other things, is always for him from “the camp”: always there, with a history at once long, recent, and present (if anyone chooses really to encounter what its presence now is, what it now means).  What the poem thus “requires”—to make us need and want such subject matter, Celan tells Daive—is nothing less than “an availability that is scorching.” From another vantage point, this partakes of the “doubleness” of poetic speech, which “doubles the world,” Celan says.  The poem seeks, among other things, to be known as what “denounces” that which has unjustly been; equally, it “announces” the more that could be seen and told: about what has existed, and what could be made to exist.  Daive in the same vein records Celan remarking:  “—Passing.  Is resemblance the passing of the world, the place, abyss or death of the world?…. —Passing: does it mean keeping what is destroyed?”  Daive records as well the astounding formulation about Kafka’s superposing of form, his tension-filled layering, that Celan ventures elsewhere in Under the Dome: Kafka writes the “yes” and the “no” not with two hands, but “with two pencils in one and the same hand” (76).  The phrase can’t help but make us hear anew the braiding of “yes” and “no” that appeared in Celan’s early poem “Speak You Also” (“Sprich Auch Du”), an address to the poet, to the reader, of the poem to itself: Speak— But keep yes and no unsplit. And give your say this meaning: give it the shade. Daive—as a poet-translator—doesn’t limit himself to the role of witness.  He senses that what’s involved here is his relation with Celan (Celan as person, poet, older friend, mentor; the work of translating the poetry together with Celan), as well as Celan becoming taken with Daive’s first volume, the book-length poem Décimale blanche, seeing in it a profound micro-experience of catastrophe experienced and stammeringly articulated, albeit with gestures toward that world of history more palpably present in Celan’s poetry.  The status of their relationship changes as Celan decides that he needs to translate Décimale blanche into German, even as he makes plans with the poet, translator, and editor André du Bouchet to shepherd the manuscript of Décimale blanche into publication. Under the Dome, written after the passage of time, becomes an understanding reached experientially, in and as—but also as a memoir of—the process of poetic form, a form that includes our reading of it.  It recounts Daive’s retrospectively deeper understanding of how much was conveyed in Celan’s first assessment to him of Décimale blanche—and in translating the poem into German as Weisse Dezimale—namely, that Celan “loved [the] impalpable concrete-abstract nature” of Décimale blanche. “The tale is merciless, familiarly merciless… [with the] density of observation—haunted observation…”  Under the Dome proves to be an understanding—first Celan’s, more slowly, Daive’s, then that of the book itself, and then our own—of what Décimale blanche was: how its stretching of modern lyric poetry’s musical abstraction could yield concrete revelation. This is not a new idea for Celan: it’s what real poetry does to make reality, to make history available to us.  But the newness is always in poetry exploring the ways to sing the more in reality that has always taken place.  To come back full circle to at least one of our circles our domes: it was what justified the “new” that Rothenberg understood—from the poets themselves—necessitated that 1959 title New Young German Poets. The complexity of what Celan hears, sees, in Daive’s poetry—an abstract concrete that is not only philosophically but sensorially alive—cannot be “unsplit” from a problem that’s bedeviled Celan from the start: the charge of a poetry so difficult that it becomes inaccessible. Celan’s stated point was that the form’s difficulty was not willful, not even willed.  Rather, it was exactly as simple—and as complex—as the subject matter, the materials, themselves: any “extra” difficulty, in what aimed to be a genuine poem, would be dilletantish distraction; any less would miss the mark a fail to give construct the form that would be the expression of the historical materials, the experience of them.  Under the Dome adds something immeasurable in value to the discussion, sheerly through the intensity and depth of Daive’s engagement, the profundity of his insight and response to the poetry. As Celan had sensed it would, Décimale blanche (1967) became a landmark in post-World War II poetry after being initially championed and shepherded into publication by Celan and A...