Ricercar per verba. Paul Celan e la musica della materia

Fifty years after Paul Celan's death and a hundred years after his birth, the study of archival sources allows for a revision of the myth of a poet who is represented on the edge of mutism, or instead as the depositary of a redeeming word from absolute evil. absolute evil. Writing from the horrors and ruins of the twentieth century becomes even more meaningful if we grasp the wide field of relations that is the cosmos. of relations that is Celan's universe. His is the polyphony of an 'other' German, in which many other languages are conglomerated conglomerated - a German hurled against the language of murderers. In a perpetual search for reality and its singable remains, Celan reverberates with the rhythm and forms of the world, jotting down books on geology, astronomy and the history of the world. of geology, astronomy, quantum physics, botany; consulting dictionaries, newspaper articles, philosophical and literary works. Crossing the territories of nature furthest removed from man - stones, crystals, sediments and geological faults; sidereal and cosmic spaces - he creates a morphology of the world. and cosmic spaces - he creates a new morphology, without origin, in continuous transformation. He restores life to what is past, he gives name and gives name and voice to bodies of which only the imprint or the halo remains for the time of a poem or a song. The musical forms, also fragmented and fossilized, become the aggregating force of exploded matter. Ricercar is the title of this book, like that of a poem that Celan did not want to publish. It takes up a contrapuntal It takes a contrapuntal musical form that interweaves the voices and notes of others without repeating them identically, thus opening the gap between past-present-future. present-future. The structures of the European, Jewish and Christian musical tradition are damaged but recognisable scaffolding for the poet. but recognisable scaffolding, and contain the residual matter of the world. Celan is not at all 'hermetic': he keeps the relationship with himself and his readers open. His poetry, which owes so much to Mandel'štam's Dante, does not pursue the "trasumanar", but makes possible the pace, the rhythm of those who - punctus contra punctum - string together shadow-light, death-life, silence-voice, stone-water, sky-abyss, in scores that do not form harmonies, but give rise to resonances between things, people (even extinct) and traces in the present. (even extinct) and traces in the present. The gait of someone who "per verba" searches for the music of matter.