https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/225040-poetry-is-perhaps-this-an-atemwende-a-turning-of-our
“Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa’s head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa’s head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?”
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Here we are at the core of Celan's relation to writing. It was not a game for him, not experiment, not even 'work' Writing, as he tells us in 'The Meridian', meant putting his existence on the line, pushing out into regions of the mind where one is exposed to the radically strange, the terrifying other, the uncanny And at the moment when existence is actually threatened, when his breath fails, when silence literally (if momentarily) means death - at this moment a poem may be born. If so, it pulls us back from the 'already-no-more' into resuming breath and life.
For this moment, this death-in-life when our breath is taken away, yet turns and re-turns, Celan coins the word Atemwende. Crucial word which appears here for the first time, before he makes it the title of one of his books.
PAUL CELAN: Collected Prose, Rosmarie Waldrop (translator), The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986, p. viii (pdf accessible via scribd)
