The Dark-houred Clock": Embodiment and Abstraction in Celan's Poetry

Celan's poetry is replete with metaphors that function in various ways. This article looks at two opposed functions of metaphors there: embodiment and abstraction. They rest on the fact that most cognitive processes occur unconsciously, leaving us with only a limited ability to understand their connections to metaphors. This makes it difficult to understand how a metaphor bridges faraway and even opposed semantic fields. The dual metaphorical functions will be studied as used in three themes of Celan's language; ( 1 ) language as expression and as concealment, (2) interaction with the Other as a key to self-constitution, and (3) the drawing of the boundary between life and death. Because these themes make it difficult to understand the function of embodiment in Celan's poetry, a systematic integration of common ideas in cognitive linguistics with Wittgensteinian concepts will be suggested with the aim of showing how Celan's poetic language deals with these complexities.