Extract

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night.

Black milk of daybreak, dug and drunk again and again: the opening incantation of Paul Celan's 1948 poem circles back on itself like a round sung in a house of death. The poem renders the Nazi camps through fugal repetition, voices layered over voices, the German language turned against itself so that the culture of Goethe and Schubert becomes the instrument of annihilation. Celan, a Romanian Jew who lost both parents to the camps, wrote in the mother tongue that was also the murderer's tongue, and that impossible position gives the poem its lacerating power. Every line builds and returns, as though memory cannot move forward. It remains the century's most devastating lyric testament to what was done and what language must still carry.