From John Felstiner’s ‘Paul Celan – Poet, Survivor, Jew’:

‘Antschel’s earliest known poem is dated by him “Mother’s Day 1938,” in May. At seventeen he was just graduating from Czernowitz’s liberal Ukrainian Gymnasium, to which he had transferred because of anti-Semitism in the Romanian state school. This sonnet to his mother, with its share of overwrought language, presents a delicate task for the translator: to expose without parodying the sentiments of a teenager.’

The mother, of course. From a sonnet to the mother, to a psalm that addresses the ‘Nothing, the No-One’s Rose.’ This ‘Psalm’ is one of my favorite poems by Celan. The poem sings to the absence of almost everything, blesses the absence, it’s because of the absence of God that we can live.