BETWEEN ‘URBILD’ AND ‘ABBILD’: THE CONCEPTION OF THE IMAGE IN CELAN’S POEMS ‘BEI WEIN UND VERLORENHEIT’, ‘TENEBRAE’, AND ‘HALBZERFRESSENER’

This article contends that the image is a central trope in Paul Celan’s poetry. It suggests that Celan’s rejection of metaphor and his opposition to readings of his poetry as mere imagery constitute only one side of his understanding of the image. On the other hand, Celan embraces the image when it goes beyond the merely figurative or imitative and approaches a form of ‘Urbild’. This article traces Celan’s understanding of the image as split between ‘Urbild’ and ‘Abbild’ in his mature poems ‘Bei Wein und Verlorenheit’, ‘Tenebrae’


INTRODUCTION
Celan's relationship with the image is a fraught one. When his poetry was described by critic Oliver Storz as 'assoziativ[e] Reihung von Traumbildern', Celan could not accept such an interpretation of his poetry as mere 'bebildert[e] Sprach[e]'. 1 For Holocaust survivor Celan, the very real trauma of Nazi persecution he negotiates in his poetry was not to be mistaken for a mere play of language or metaphorical disfiguration. 2 'Les champs de blés aux corbeaux', KG, 94). 7 Both of these usages of 'Bild' are patently not coextensive with the image understood as metaphor.
However, understanding the image in Celan as a visual image or even more specifically as the 'Bild' of the visual arts is as problematic as conflating Celan's image with metaphor. Frequently and explicitly, Celan does not understand the image as a visual entity. In fact, when the image has positive connotations he typically stresses, as he does in his notes to his 1960 'Meridian' speech, that 'Bildhaftes, das ist keineswegs etwas Visuelles' and claims that 'Bild = Vision (nicht: Metapher)' (M, 107, 109; see also 101). Given these remarks, some iconoclastic tendencies in his poetic ekphrasis, 8 and the fact that in many cases Celan's interest in the visual arts was driven by his personal interest in the artist, as seems to have been the case with Guéricault and Van Gogh 9 as well as with his wife Gisèle Lestrange, 10 gleaning a systematic conception of the image from Celan's engagement with the visual arts faces significant difficulties.
I will suggest here that Celan's conception of the image is best understood not simply in terms of metaphor or of his engagement with images in the visual arts, but in terms of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic distinction between 'Urbild' and 'Abbild'. This distinction in turn informs Celan's thinking about metaphor and, at least in part, underpins Celan's approach to the visual arts. In what follows I will give a brief outline of this distinction and sketch how it underpins Celan's thinking about the image before turning my attention to three poems in which it is particularly pronounced: 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', 'Tenebrae', and 'Halbzerfressener'.
Celan's seemingly contradictory stance on the image -as 'Abbild und Nachbild' (KG, 180) and as 'nichts Visuelles, sondern etwas Geistiges' (M, 101) -is inherited from the conceptual ambivalence of the image in Western intellectual history that goes back to Plato. In Platonic and Neo-platonic philosophy, the image is split between what from the Middle Platonic Academy (266-241 bc) onward was often called 'archetypos'translated by German Platonists and Neo-platonists with 'Urbild' -and the 'ektypos' or 'typos' -translated as 'Abbild'. 11 The 'Urbild' is the original 7 Werner Wögerbauer, 'Drei Skizzen zu Bildgedichten Paul Celans', Celan-Jahrbuch, 7 (1998), 165-77 (174-5). 8 Ibid., 173. 9 Frank Brüder, 'Kunst', in Celan-Handbuch (note 2), pp. 278-86 (pp. 279-80). 10 Barbara Wiedemann, '"Und sie auf meine Art entziffern". Zur Entstehung der Edition Schwarzmaut von Gisèle Celan-Lestrange und Paul Celan', in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts, Tübingen 2001, pp. 263-92. Wiedemann stresses the independence of Celan's and Lestrange's oeuvres (p. 267). 11 The Greek terms (sometimes also Latinised with the '-us' rather than the '-os' suffix) come from the art of coinage, where the 'archetypos' denotes the coin die or form that is pressed into the metal to mint a coin, the 'typos', see J. Hüllen, 'Archetypus', Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, 13 vols, Schwabe 2007, I, pp. 497-500. I will use 'archetypos' interchangeably with 'Urbild' and will predominantly use the adjectival form 'archetypal' to denote 'urbildlich'. or model which the image represents. Thus, every time we hear 'image' we should hear an appended, silent 'of': the image is always an image of something, even as an abstract concept. This something which the image represents is external to the image. On the other hand, that which is represented, that is, the 'Urbild', does not present itself in the image, but is re-presented by the image or 'typos.' The image implies a onedirectional dependence relation to the 'Urbild' it represents. In resembling the 'Urbild', the 'Abbild' necessarily differs from it, especially when we conceive of the 'Urbild' as a divine being -as (Neo-)Platonic Christians did -that necessarily escapes any attempt of being visually captured. 12 When we speak of an image or 'Abbild' in this (Neo-)Platonic framework, we talk of an entity or concept that is inherently lacking. Unlike the English image, which derives from the Latin 'imitatio' and is therefore only understood in the sense of 'Abbild', 13 the faultline between 'Urbild' and 'Abbild' -that is, between that which is represented and that which represents -runs through the 'Bild' 14 in Celan's German and thus explains his ambivalent, or indeed paradoxical, remarks about the image. Hence, when on the one hand, Celan rejects the image as 'Abbild und Nachbild' (KG, 180) and as mere metaphor, but on the other hand emphasises that the image is not visual but visionary (M, 107 and 109), he seems to echo the (Neo-)Platonic distinction between 'typos' or 'ektypos' and 'archetypos', respectively. Celan associates the mental or even spiritual image that is 'nichts Visuelles, sondern etwas Geistiges' (M, 101) with a 'Wissen und Sehen von nacktester Evidenz' (M, 128). Only true perception -'Sehen als Gewahren, Wahrnehmen, Wahrhaben, Wahrsein' (M, 134; underlining in original) -can see this non-visual image. 15 Traces of such an archetypal conception of the image and seeing in Celan are also found in his engagement with the visual arts, especially his translation of Bazaine's Notes sur la peinture d'aujourd'hui, when Bazaine speaks of 'die Verinnerlichung des Visuellen' and a 'Mehr-als-Sehen'. 16  This is a cursory overview and below I will examine how the distinction plays out in Celan in more minute detail in his poems 'Tenebrae', 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', and 'Halbzerfressener' (KG,97,126,195), written at the height of his career.

THE LACK OF A DIVINE 'URBILD' IN 'TENEBRAE'
'Tenebrae' is among Celan's most explicit engagements with the traditional conception of the relation between 'Urbild' and 'Abbild' and the poem also re-evaluates the traditional conception of imago Dei (as we will see below). 'Tenebrae' consists of nine stanzas and was written in 1957 and published as part of the poetry volume Sprachgitter in 1959. The title of the poem alludes to a Christian Easter mass which takes place in church after dark in the last three days of Holy Week. During the ceremony candles are extinguished, symbolising the dying of Christ at the Cross, while religious chants are sung (see Wiedemann's notes: KG, 649). As the title suggests, we encounter allusions to the Eucharist and the crucifixion of Christ in the poem. Formally the poem most closely resembles a religious song or plaint to God, although the traditional direction of address, from man to God, is inverted, as we will see. 17 The poem stands in a long tradition of lamentations to God but exceeds the plaintive impetus of most ritual lamentations in its climactic eighth stanza where God becomes a mere 'Abbild' in a trough of blood he has shed. While most critics note the Eucharistic motif and point to similarities of the Divine image in the trough with the image of Christ on the Cross, 18 and some compare the lamenting poetic voice of the poem with Christ's moment of doubt on the Cross (see Matthew 27:46), 19 to which moment the titular 'tenebrae' also refers (Matthew 27:45), 20  After the first stanzas, in which Celan seems to evoke scenes from concentration camps with bodies clawing into each other, the first-person plural poetic voice bows before a trough ('Tränke') filled with blood in which God is transformed into a mere image (an allusion to and reversal of Eucharistic transubstantiation in which wine is supposedly transformed into blood). 21 As the image of God materialises in the trough, we realise that the suggestively obeisant gesture of bowing to the frequently invoked divine Lordship is controverted, since we do not gaze up to look for signs of God but bend over ('zu bücken') to behold the image of God. This implies an inversion of above and below in and through the formation of the divine image in the trough at our feet. 22 22 Celan alludes to and inverts Psalm 145:14 here; see Wögerbauer: 'Une fois de plus, le poème inverse ce que dit le psaume : Yahvé retient tous ceux qui tombent, redresse tous ceux qui sont courbés (Ps. 145, 14). Dans le poème de Celan, ceux qui ploient sous le joug ne sont pas redressés, entire complex of value changes that occur within the traditional Christian framework of meanings which governs perceptions of the below. An all too speculative interpretation could elaborate on connotations of hell and underworld here; these endeavours, however, would rely on thin evidence in the text itself. That which is below the poetic voice is not an otherworldly realm, an absolute below. Rather, what lies below the poetic voice is relative to its position as beholder -to its position as plaintiff, reader, and victim. The fact that the poetic voice sees God in a trough below nonetheless carries connotations of God's abjectness and inferiority of power. God's image in the trough beneath the poetic voice is a display on the surface of the blood and therefore lacks profundity and depth.
The words of Psalm 23 echoed in the poem, according to which God leads the Psalmist to the water and restores his soul, 23 now get a cynical twist as we find out that the trough is filled with 'Blut, […] was du vergossen, Herr'. Depending on whether we read the verb 'vergossen' as transitive or ditransitive, the shed blood can be interpreted as either coming from God, evoking Christ's blood on the Cross, or as that of the poetic voice (and by implication the victims of the Holocaust), accusing God of the crimes of the Holocaust. Many critics follow both readings and believe that Celan underlines a similarity between Christ's sacrifice and the massacred Jews. 24 Wögerbauer is appreciably careful in asserting that '[l]e poème dit qu'il y a une relation entre les deux sangs' ('the poem says that there is a relation between the two types of blood'; my translation), 25 rather than prematurely affirming, like Seng, that this relation consists of an 'Annäherung an Christus'. 26 Given our reading up to this point, this caution is well justified, because in what would this approaching consist? In light of Christ's divine provenance and the resurrection after his crucifixion, in light of the theological and teleological purposiveness of his sacrifice, none of which applies to the senseless murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, such attestations seem imprudent. 27 The sarcastic tone of the opening lines that had evoked a proximity to God due to the impending death of the poetic voice ('Nah sind wir, Herr') has not changed by the time the poetic voice gazes into the trough filled with blood. Let us take a closer look at the nature of the relation between the two bloods and between poetic voice and God, which culminates in the image that forms in the trough in stanza eight.
In this image Celan not only contradicts the hierarchy of vision in the Christian (and also, in part, the Jewish) tradition by the inversion of the direction of the gaze (below, into the trough, instead of above into the heavens) and of the direction of prayer ('Bete, Herr, / bete zu uns'), but also by a perverted form of transubstantiation of God as an image in the trough. The senselessness of the crimes of the Holocaust is embodied and symbolised by the image that forms in the trough. The violence, of course, is already signified by the image's material constitution: it is an image reflected in blood. But the senselessness is also more subtly intimated by the structure of the image. Images in bodies of water are mirror-images, they are copies of an original, i.e. 'Abbilder' of an 'Urbild'. However, the mirrorimage to which we bow down does not seem to have an 'Urbild'; in fact, God's substance seems to transform into a mere, substance-less image which is (re)producing itself in what is either the fluid of his own disembodiment or the blood of his victims. 28 In either case the theological underpinning of the Christian conception of the image is dissolved from within in Celan's evocation of the divine image here; and with it, all corollaries of the divine 'Urbild' -its theological, teleological transcendency and, since God is implied to be complicit in the crimes, its ultimate status as moral paragon -are abandoned. The collapsing of the 'Urbild' into the 'Abbild' not only renders God visible in explicit contradiction of the Second Commandment, but such a complete trespass of the divine into the visual realm inscribes upon His image the discrepancy from the 'Urbild' that inheres in the conception of the 'Abbild'. The copy that is the mirrorimage in the trough is a copy discrepant to itself, a reproduction without an original. 29 Such a copy's copy is, of course, entirely vacant 30 and, indeed, 28 Sowa-Bettecken also interprets the image as a mirror-image and believes that God's image being reflected, rather than that of the poetic voice, is a further sign of their closeness, suggesting that 'im Spiegelbild der Sprechenden das Bild des Herrn aufsteigt'. These readings of unification or approximation between Christ and the poetic voice, however, gloss over the violence with which this image enters into the eyes of the poetic voice. Sowa-Bettecken rephrases the violent intrusion of 'warf uns dein Bild in die Augen' in religious terms as an entering or merging into (eintreten); Sowa-Bettecken, Sprache der Hinterlassenschaft (note 18), p. 189. 29 This may echo Benjamin's conception of the artwork in the age of reproduction, but the implications here are quite different. Benjamin sees positive political and aesthetic revolutionary potential in artworks (such as photographs) that are copies without an original. The copy-image in Celan's 'Tenebrae' on the other hand is not positive and is, as I suggest in my interpretation, vacant and without essence when deprived of its archetypal original. Walter Benjamin, 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit', in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols, Frankfurt a. M. 1974, I/1, pp. 431-509. 30 The vacancy of God's image here is not related to the pregnant use of 'Nichts' in the poem 'Mandorla', by which Celan evokes mystical connotations of God as a substance that can only be apophatically described (from our human perspective) as nothing (cf. KG, 142). On the vacancy of the image here in relation to 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', see also Wögerbauer: 'Le sang, et l'emblème qu'il contient, trouvent leur adéquation dans le vide. Cet accueil engloutit également the divine image cast into our eyes -an almost violent act of intrusion into our retina 31 -elicits their emptiness of expression: 'Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr, / Augen und Mund stehn so offen und leer, Herr. ' If, in the Christian tradition to which Celan alludes here, we understand ourselves as human beings and as self-conscious subjects through our being imago Dei, the image is fundamental to the poetic subject's constitution as poetic voice. Thus, the image as 'Abbild' in 'Tenebrae' undermines the voice's ability to assert itself. The seeming diminution of God's power as 'Abbild' does not concomitantly augment our own powers of self-determination similar to Goethe's Prometheus who formed 'Menschen / Nach [s]einem Bilde'. 32 It is not only the conception of the divine image which Celan controverts in 'Tenebrae'. In making a (liquid) mirror the mediator between God and our (self-)perception, Celan also takes up another foundational metaphor of Christian philosophy in the tradition of Augustine. Celan undermines the traditional role of this reflecting interface in the conception of the imago Dei, and in turn, undermines how humankind can comprehend God as well as itself as mens humana through the contemplation of God. 33 In his De trinitate in particular, Augustine had used the metaphor of the mirror as a core element in his exposition of how humankind comes to reach understanding of God and recognise itself as image of God. According to Augustine, as man is looking at his image in the (metaphorical, intellectual) mirror, he recognises himself as image and as bearing likeness to God. 34 Since this form of mirror-reflection is an intellectual act, looking and recognition are not mere passive display on a mirror as on a projection screen, but an activity of constituting that which elevates humankind above other beings and distinguishes it from other creatures: its mens. 35  speculum) man realises his being a finite image of God. 36 From Augustine on, this conception of the intellectual act of mirroring and image formation becomes immensely productive in Christian philosophical thought, and is foundational to, for instance, Eckhart's conception of 'Bildung' 37 and to the mirror-motif as perpetuated by Cusanus in his conception of the imago Dei. 38 Such self-acting image production on the intellectual mirror has a strong tendency towards the iconoclastic in that the (typos-)image disposes of its visual tabernacle and is entirely elevated into the spiritual realm in approximating the 'Urbild'. 39 Yet, the bloody mirror of Celan's poem that casts the divine image into our eyes is not an active production of our contemplating intellect, as in the Augustinian tradition. We have already discussed how the mirror reflects the divine image without an original, collapsing the 'Urbild' into the 'Abbild', whereby the 'Abbild's' difference from itself is totalised, effectively uncreating the entire image. But the mirror metaphor in Celan goes further. Instead of situating the mirror in our mens humana as the Patristic tradition had done, the mirror is located in and constituted by the blood. In this line of reading, the 'Urbild' become 'Abbild' implies the physical disembodiment of the poetic voice by exsanguination as well as the lack of an 'Urbild' through which it could recognise itself as subject, as imago Dei. The image in the blood is therefore doubly outside its proper domain. The reflected image is a reflection outside our mental faculties, for which our body serves as tabernacle according to the Augustinian tradition, depriving us of the possibility of recognising ourselves as human subjects (in recognising ourselves as imago Dei). Further, even this tabernacle is deprived of its life-giving essence by its bleeding out. Hence, in a crassly sarcastic contortion of Augustine's metaphor, in 'Tenebrae' the mirror does form in us, or rather in a part of us: our blood that has been shed. Consequently, the emptiness of expression of the divine image cast into our eyes is not just a nonentity in and of our perception, but affects our very self-perception and constitution, at least by the way the mirror and the image are conceived in the Christian tradition in our recognition and knowledge of ourselves.
Indeed, Celan undermines the conception of God through the image and concomitantly of the plural poetic voice so completely (death already 36 Kreuzer, 'Von Augustinus bis Eckhart' (note 33), p. 84. 37 Ibid., p. 89. 38 'Indem der Mensch -als selbstaktiver Spiegel der Bildhaftigkeit der Wirklichkeit -eben diese Bildhaftigkeit auch tatsächlich einsieht und denkt, realisiert er erst sein Bild-Sein'; Thomas Leinkauf, 'Der Bild-Begriff bei Cusanus', in Grave and Schubbach (eds), Denken mit dem Bild (note 33), pp. 99-129 (pp. 106-7). 39 Kreuzer points to, for example, John Scotus Eriugena for his 'ikonophoben Aufhebung der Bilder in einer rein geistigen Schöpfung zu der die "sinnliche Kreatur verwandelt wird."' Meister Eckhart speaks of 'entbilden' in much the same spirit. See Kreuzer, 'Von Augustinus bis Eckhart' (note 33), pp. 84-8. having loomed in the subtext of the second stanza) that the entire fabric of the poem is threatened. And this fabric is, of course, poetic speech. Consequently, the empty expression is not only in our eyes, once the image strikes our retina, but the mouth, too, is 'offen und leer'. Similar to the divine de-substantiation in the 'Abbild' which is constituted in perennial difference to itself, destituting the 'Urbild', verbal expression seems consumed by the emptiness and senselessness of the deeds committed against us as victims and readers of violence. This resonates phonetically in the echo of 'Herr' in 'leer' which represents sonically what is inherent in the structure of the divine image in the trough. The echo of 'Herr' in 'leer' has expressly nothing as its origin: Leere. 40 The negative, empty visuality of the image now seems to have encroached upon our possibility to speak.
The poem could end here. But it does not. The eyes seem to be permanently blinded, incapable of further perception -indeed, this is already programmatically projected by the title 'Tenebrae', which means obscurity. The mouth, however, almost silently returns in the subsequent stanza: 'Wir haben getrunken, Herr. / Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr.' Poetic speech seems to somehow go on through the act of drinking, which Wögerbauer believes 'devient constitutif d'un nouveau langage' ('becomes constitutive of a new language'; my translation), that is, however, a 'contrelangue' ('counter-language') to the language of Christianity and belief. 41 The act of swallowing, especially in the perfective tense of '[w]ir haben getrunken' suggests the passivity and powerlessness of victims of violence, and in his commentary on the poem Lönker even goes so far as to suggest that the swallowing and the last lines of the poem confirm the death of the poetic voice. 42 Once again Celan inverts the supposed spiritual replenishment of the Eucharist. Unlike Matthew 26:28, the act of drinking the blood does not imply 'remission of sins' and, unlike John 6:58, the blood does not appear to be a source of life. Indeed, the consumption of the blood by the poetic voice seems to be the climax of Celan's inversion of Christian tropes and motifs. The poetic voice consumes itself by consuming the blood -possibly its own -and the image, insofar as it consumes God as image and therefore consumes itself as imago Dei. , which also evokes the Holocaust and where swallowing is likewise associated with death. 43 Georg-Michael Schulz very appositely reads the act of swallowing as 'auto-consommation': 'il s'agirait donc (car je pense, à l'évocation de l'image, à l'homme fait à l'image de Dieu, qui -sous la At the same time, despite the implications of self-consumption and selfabnegation in the act of drinking, the poetic voice seems to defiantly persevere by having drunk the blood and, in the last lines of the poem, calls on God to pray. The poetic voice is still not entirely the arbiter of its own fate. It does not assertively tell God to pray to it anymore, as it did in the third stanza. It is also still not an agentive subject of verbs in the present tense, which would indicate that it is in control of its acts. However, the imperative appeal to God to pray attests to the continuation of poetic speech beyond the presumed death of the speaker and beyond a God become 'Abbild'. Poetic speech survives as plaint. In Celan's 'Tenebrae' the image plays an entirely negative role. The would-be and should-be 'Urbild' that is God is nothing but an 'Abbild' and threatens poetic speech. In the next poem I want to examine -'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit' -we witness a similar loss of an 'Urbild', yet here Celan maintains a more positive outlook for poetry's ability to give testimony of the 'Urbild'. While in 'Tenebrae' we have seen that Celan's image as 'etwas Geistiges' (M, 101) is wholly negative when it becomes mere material 'Abbild', a closer look at 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit' will show us how Celan connects his notion of the image, informed by the philosophical tradition of thinking the image, with the Judaeo-Christian mythology of the confusion of tongues. Language(s) after Babel are merely metaphorical, 'bebildert', and 'umgelogen' as Celan says in his poem, whereas for Celan, poetry is 'Unübertragbar' and 'anti-metaphorisch' (M, 145).

SPEAKING AFTER BABEL IN 'BEI WEIN UND VERLORENHEIT'
In his 1959 poem 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', published as part of the poetry volume Die Niemandsrose (1963), Celan associates the confusion of tongues with a form of 'Abbild' that is clearly negatively connoted, sparked in part by persistent reviews of his works as metaphorical and consisting of mere imagery (see introduction). In the poem, the irremediable separation between an originary, lost form of speaking (a loss already evident in the titular 'Verlorenheit') and the languages of mankind is already formally expressed in the stanzaic divisions: 44 the Pegasus-like God's singing of the second stanza is juxtaposed with mankind's mistranslation of God's song, amounting to nothing but images and lies in the third. 45 In my analysis here, I will predominantly focus on the notion of the image expressed in the 'bebilderten Sprachen' of the third stanza: Bei Wein und Verlorenheit, bei beider Neige: ich ritt durch den Schnee, hörst du, ich ritt Gott in die Ferne -die Nähe, er sang, es war unser letzter Ritt über die Menschen-Hürden.
Sie duckten sich, wenn sie uns über sich hörten, sie schrieben, sie logen unser Gewieher um in eine ihrer bebilderten Sprachen. (KG,126) The derivative character of the image in question here is already apparent in its prefix 'be-', indicating its status as a mere 'Abbild'. The 'Abbild'character of these languages is intricately linked to their being written -'sie / schrieben' -and thus contrasting with the unwritten divine incantation. 46 Indeed, the derivative written character of man's languages is addressed not only semantically, but visually. The deficient and subordinate ('sie duckten sich') character of man's languages of images is emblematised by the positioning of stanza three below God's archetypal song in stanza two, whose visual placement above stanza three, in turn, relates to the upward movement that is described semantically ('Ritt über / die Menschen-Hürden'; my emphasis).
Mankind's inability to understand God's song is also apparent in the fragmented character of the third stanza which is particularly marked in 'sie / schrieben, sie / logen', where the line breaks separating subject and verb echo the divide between man's languages and God's song. In another, further sense, the Divine Word is betrayed here. By means of the symmetry between '[s]ie duckten sich', 'sie schrieben', 'sie logen', Celan uses syntactical parallelism to turn the Bible's most important poetic device against the Divine Word (or song), suggesting a duplicitousness that is also already conveyed in mankind's act of lying. 47  character of these 'Abbilder' that are man's languages thus inheres in the grammatical structure of these languages themselves. 48 This derivative character is also conveyed in their plurality, embodying their difference to the univocity of God's archetypal song -a differential character that governs these languages internally, even down to their broken-up structure.
It is worth dwelling a bit more on this plurality of mankind's languages which alludes to the Biblical confusion of tongues and which Celan sees as a linguistic Fall of Man. 49 For Celan the event that brings about the confusion of tongues is not of an unhistorical, mythological nature but is re-imagined as the historical trauma that is the Holocaust. According to Winfried Menninghaus: 'die Erfahrung des Faschismus [ist…] der historische Grund der Aktualisierung der Sündenfallgeschichte' in Celan's conception of language. 50 Linguistic expression is encumbered by the historical 'Asche ausgebrannter Sinngebung', as Celan would state in his 1948 poetological essay 'Edgar Jené und der Traum vom Traume', 51 and an archetypal linguistic state in which word and thing are one is lost. 52 Yet, the hope for a more archetypal form of communication remains, whether he declares in his 1948 essay that he wants to restore 'jene Ursprünglichkeit' in which 'Anfang und Ende zusammen[fielen]' (GW III, 156 and 157, respectively) 53 or lets the poetic voice listen to God's song eleven years later in his 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit'. 54 However, in the light of the plurality of languages confounding mankind's communication in the last line of the poem, we have to read the poem anew. The impossibility of truthful expression in language after Babel is most densely encapsulated in the polyglot pun of 'Neige' in the second line of the poem. 'Neige' is not only the German word for decline -which in the context of the poem's title seems to have connotations of loss -but also the French word for snow, echoed in its German equivalent 'Schnee' here. Additionally, it bears resemblance to the 'Nähe' in the poem and the English word 'neigh', which in turn is picked up semantically when mankind merely hears 'Gewieher' where the poetic voice hears God's song. 55 We realise that the heterology of languages even encroaches upon the first-person voice. Celan, too, writes after Babel. The sense of loss conveyed by 'Neige' is also enacted by its relation to Nähe/neige/neigh, evoking the heterology of languages and their distance from archetypal speaking. The 'Nähe' into which the poetic voice rides the God-horse, passing through 'Schnee' or neige, becomes linked to the sensation of loss and linguistic confusion via the polyglot 'Neige'.
Moreover, we realise that the poetic voice which so seemingly confidently steers the divine horse does not itself actually communicate divine song to us. Rather, the poetic voice has to evoke a 'du' as witness to divine song -'hörst du' -and only through this address to the testifying 'you' do we know of divine song. Hence, we only know, along with and through the 'you', that there is singing, not what is sung. Indeed, we must realise that the poetic voice expresses itself only as text -indeed, testimony of divine singing is only borne by the written words of the poem. The text as (visual) text (rather than spoken word) draws itself into question via Neige/Nähe/neige/neigh, since as Yoko Tawada perspicaciously discerns '[d]as englische Wort 'neigh' (Gewieher) weicht zwar von dem deutschen Wort 'Neige' orthografisch etwas ab, aber dennoch geht es hier eher um eine grafische Ähnlichkeit als um eine phonetische'. 56 Thus, unlike Arno Schmidt, who envisions a form of unio mystica between poetic voice and God, 57 and Jean Bollack, for whom the 'Schnee', somewhat inexplicably, is 'etwas Abbildloses, Unbebildertes' and thus archetypal, 58 my interpretation sees the heteroglossia of 'Schnee' as 'neige' and its similarity to 'neigh' precisely as a mark of linguistic separation between the poetic voice and God. The plurality of tongues suggests an unbridgeable gap between the (absent) archetypal song and its indirect, textual representation in the poem. Indeed, the only time that the poetic voice and God-horse are described as speaking in unison, they are ironically characterised -from the perspective of mankind -as neighing ('Gewieher'). This neighing in turn embodies the confusion of languages in its similarity to Neige/Nähe/neige. 55  Thus, the seeming unity between poetic voice and God-horse already suggests an inherent gap between poetic voice and the divine 'Urbild'.
Certainly, even if the poetic voice cannot join the God-horse in its song, the repeated use of the first-person plural pronoun ('unser', 'uns', 'unser'; see lines 6, 9, 11) in opposition to the third person plural of mankind ('sie') also implies their fundamental difference. Whereas mankind ducks down ('[s]ie duckten sich'), the poetic voice and 'du' listen to divine song. Thus, even if poetic voice and 'du' (and the reader of the poem) do not partake in archetypal speaking, they are also not speaking in the false 'bebilderten Sprachen' of mankind. In his 1960 'Meridian' speech, Celan would be more positive and envision a possibility for poetic language to approach the archetypal. Celan hopes that in speaking 'in eines Anderen Sache', that is, an intimate, dialogical other akin to the 'du' we encounter in 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', the poem could also speak 'in eines ganz Anderen Sache' (M, 8; italics in original). This 'ganz Andere' is nothing other than a 'Hilfswort' for God. 59 Thus, even if poetic speech remains 'terrestrisc[h]' (M, 12) and does not undo the linguistic Fall of Man, it approximates archetypal speech and is precisely not merely 'übertragen' (M, 145), metaphorical, and a linguistic 'Abbild' thereof.

SUBJECTIVITY AND THE IMAGE IN 'HALBZERFRESSENER'
In 'Tenebrae', the loss of an 'Urbild' as the ontological basis of the 'Abbild' almost completely undermines the possibility of communication. Similarly, in 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', Celan associates the confused languages that speak in mere metaphors with a negatively conceived 'Bebilderung' of a form of linguistic 'Urbild'.
The 'bebilderten Sprachen' of mankind in 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit' and Celan's inversion of the traditional discourse on the imago Dei in 'Tenebrae' find their positive counterpart in his 1964 poem 'Halbzerfressener', published as part of the volume Atemwende published in 1967. In the poem, the image as a form of 'Urbild' is constitutive of the poetic voice, rather than threatening its existence as 'Abbild'. This different role of the image in 'Halbzerfressener' goes hand in hand with a different relationship between language and image: I would like to particularly focus on the dialogical relation between the I and you -which were also present in the previous two poems, but which I did not explicitly discuss. The dialogue is a form of dualism very different from the dualism of 'Urbild' and 'Abbild'. In 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit', the 'du' appealed to by the poetic voice is not part of the 'Menschen-Hürden' of the third stanza who create 'Abbilder', and although 'Tenebrae' ends more ambivalently, the poetic address to the second person singular, namely God, seems to let the first-person poetic voice continue speaking. A poetic interchange based on listening and speaking, a dialogue in which the speakers engage with each other in an attempt to bridge possible differences, seems to be Celan's ideal for communicating and translating in language. Framed in the words of Walter Benjamin's famous translation essay, rather than copying the original ('abbilden'), Celan seeks a fitting together ('anbilden') of languages and fragments of speech which, 'anstatt dem Sinn des Originals sich ähnlich zu machen', are recognisable as parts of 'einer größeren Sprache'. 60 This dialogical conception of language in relation to the image is perhaps most expressly found in Celan's 'Halbzerfressener'. Divided across the poem's two stanzas, we move from a visual outside to an inside that withdraws from the perceptual grasp of our sense of vision. The partially eroded corbel that opens the poem is a representation whose representationality is patently visible: 'masken-/ gesichtig'. The visual mask is emphasised further by the mid-word enjambement after 'masken-'. This enjambement, which so ostentatiously foregrounds the pretence of the mask's display, calls to mind the prominent enjambements in 'Bei Wein und Verlorenheit' where 'sie / schrieben, sie / logen' so emphatically condemned the visuality as 'Abbild' of mankind's picturised languages. We should not necessarily think of the mask as concealing the corbel's face, but rather the mask is the face of the corbel, since the word mask as technical term in the arts is synonymous with 'Kragstein'. 61 The mask-character and the associations of deceitfulness which go along with this word thus pertain not to an assumed visual display or wilful deceit by the corbel but concern the very nature of the corbel as such, as artifice. This is important because it entails that the opposition in the poem is not between a false and a true to the divine 'Urbild' in its own image as imago Dei, which we discussed in 'Tenebrae'. Whereas in 'Tenebrae' Augustine's notion of the imago Dei was only negatively present in its absence, as it were, in 'Halbzerfressener ' we encounter what appears to almost be a positive counterpart to the lacking imago Dei in 'Tenebrae'. Further corroborating our suspicion that the idea of the imago Dei informs this poem, the inside of the corbel's skull in 'Halbzerfressener' is also the heaven ('Himmel'), that is the traditional locus of the divine 'Urbild' as image in which the Augustinian mens would recognise itself. Yet we should be more cautious in our interpretation. 'Himmel' can mean both a divine heaven as well as a terrestrial sky; furthermore, the rather sober and anatomical description of the mens as 'Schädelinnere' and possibly the brain as 'Windung' 66 secularises Augustine's solemnly spiritual concept and quite literally grounds it, considering the agrarian vocabulary. The 'Urbild' of which an image is formed hence is not divine but rather that of the corbel contemplating itself as (mental) image. 67 Yet, there is potentially more to this corbel, and the 'Windung' and 'umbrechen' of the second stanza provide a clue: they are German variants of the Latin 'versus'. Eventually, the self-contemplating act takes place in and through poetry, and consequently the contemplator or corbel is none other than the poet himself who (re)constitutes himself -continuously -in the act of writing.
Celan had said in his Meridian speech that '[d]as Gedicht will zu einem Anderen.
[…] Erst im Raum dieses Gesprächs konstituiert sich das Angesprochene, versammelt es sich um das ansprechende und nennende Ich' (M, 9). The contemplating poet thus becomes a 'wahrnehmende[s] Du' in his self-reflection, which is nothing other than 'ein Sichvorausschicken zu sich selbst, auf der Suche nach sich selbst' (M, 11). This self-recreation as reflected 'Bild' via the contemplating you, perhaps, for the briefest of moments, turns and returns to recognise and meet himself as self-defining, secular 'Urbild': 'Ich bin […] mir selbst begegnet' (M, 11). In this encounter between the first-person poetic voice and the other, the intra-linguistic divide between archetypal speaking and a language of 'Abbilder' seems to have been bridged by the momentary self-recognition of the first-person poetic voice in the image of the other.