Paul Celan: ‘Perhaps poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself. Though where? in what place? how? as what? This would mean art is the distance poetry must cover.

Rosemarie Waldrop, commenting: ‘He always finds himself face to face with the incomprehensible, inaccesessible, the "language of stone". And his only recourse is talking. This cannot be "literature". Literature belongs to those who are at home in the world’.

from Josipovici, The Singer on the Shore