Overshadowed

The poems contained in this collection were not published until 1991, twenty years after the author's death, although some of them were published in a small anthology as early as 1968. They come from a handwritten bundle found in Celan's office at the École Normale Supérieure and were written between February and May 1966 at the St. Anne's Psychiatric University Clinic. Thus, chronologically they fall into the final phase of work on the collection "Fibrous Suns", with which they have many thematic parallels. Two leitmotifs dominate here - the motif of the loss of light and the motif of suffering. In terms of their figurative system, they belong to Celan's "atonal" lyrics.