At UbuWeb, you can hear Celan reading both “Todesfuge” and “Engführung” here.

Celan began a long poem in which “what’s real happens.” It was his follow-up to “Todesfuge” and moved deeper into inaccessible terrain. “Engführung” pushes his earlier title further, denoting a fugue’s “stretto,” the intense, overlapping entrances of themes, literally a “leading narrowly” or “leading into the straits” — which describes this poem’s form and content alike. An English title might be “Straitening,” but when a French translation was prepared, Celan approved Strette for Engführung. …

“Stretto,” by far Celan’s most demanding poem, came just after the Bremen speech, which ends with the poet “stricken by and seeking reality.” He told an interviewer in Bremen: “In my first book I was still transfiguring things — I’ll never do that again!” “Engführung” reconceives the manner and matter of “Todesfuge,” going beyond the pathos of black milk, exploring memory itself as a dimension of the original trauma. The poem’s close melds into its opening, the way memory almost coincides with reality. And there is something else here, easy to miss. Not only does an asterisk come after each section, but there is also an asterisk between the title and the first line — a mark devoid of purpose unless we are to link “Stretto”‘s last line to its first and set out again, da capo. Repeat this to the six-millionth degree, and “Nothing is lost.” [1]

The Straitening

*

Driven into the
terrain
with the unmistakable track:

grass, written asunder. The stones, white,
with the shadows of grassblades:
Do not read any more - look!
Do not look any more - go!

Go, your hour
has no sisters, you are -
are at home. A wheel, slow,
rolls out of itself, the spokes
climb,
climb on a blackish field, the night
needs no stars, nowhere
does anyone ask after you.

*
          Nowhere
                    does anyone ask after you -

The place where they lay, it has
a name - it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.

Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. None 
awoke,
sleep
came over them.

*
          Came, came. Nowhere
                    anyone asks -

It is I, I,
I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, ticked at you, your breathing
obeyed, it is
I still, but then 
you are asleep.

*
          It is  I still -

years,
years, years, a finger
feels down and up, feels
around:
seams, palpable, here
it is split wide open, here
it grew together again - who
covered it up?

*
          Covered it
                    up - who?

Came, came.
Came a word, came,
came through the night,
wanted to shine, wanted to shine.

Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night.
Night-and-night. - Go
to the eye, the moist one.

*
          Go
               to the eye,
                    the moist one -

Gales.
Gales, from the beginning of time,
whirl of particles, the other,
you
know it, though, we
read it in the book, was
opinion.

Was, was
opinion. How
did we touch
each other - each other with
these
hands?

There was written too, that.
Where? We
put a silence over it,
stilled with poison, great,
a
green
silence, a sepal, an
idea of vegetation attached to it -
green, yes,
attached, yes,
under a crafty
sky.

Of, yes,
vegetation.

Yes.
Gales, whirl of part-
icles, there was
time left, time
to try it out with the stone - it
was hospitable, it
did not cut in. How 
lucky we were:

Grainy,
grainy and stringy. Stalky,
dense:
grapy and radiant; kidneyish,
flattish and
lumpy; loose, tang-
led -; he, it
did not cut in, it
spoke,
willingly spoke to dry eyes, before closing them.

Spoke, spoke.
Was, was.

We
would not let go, stood
in the midst, a 
porous edifice, and
it came.

Came at us, came
through us, patched
invisibly, patched
away at the last membrane
and
the world, a millicrystal,
shot up, shot up.

*
          Shot up, shot up.
                    Then -

Nights, demixed. Circles,
green or blue, scarlet
squares: the
world puts its inmost reserves
into the game with the new
hours. - Circles,
red or black, bright
squares, no
flight shadow,
no
measuring table, no
smoke soul ascends or joins in.

*
          Ascends and
                    joins in -

At owl's flight, near
the petrified scabs,
near
our fled hands, in
the latest rejection,
above
the rifle-range near
the buried wall:

visible, once
more: the
grooves, the

choirs, at that time, the
psalms. Ho, ho-
sannah.

So
there are temples yet. A
star
probably still has light.
Nothing,
nothing is lost.

Ho-
sannah.

At owl's flight, here,
the conversations, day-grey,
of the water-level traces.

*
          (--day-grey,
                    of
                         the water-level traces - 
Driven into the
terrain
with
the unmistakable
track:

Grass,
grass,
written asunder.)

1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 118, 125. [↩]