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In the Sonnets to Orpheus Rilke proclaims, “Singing is being” [Gesang ist Dasein], in an affirmation of the life attained through art that Nietzsche spoke of in The Birth of Tragedy. This is not an individual life but the whole of being, in which poet and reader share, provided they surrender to the movement of the song, the rhythm of its words. Celan’s halting rhythm could not be more different than Rilke’s, and yet his poetry also invites the reader to surrender to the work, albeit not to the words but to the wounds it opens within them, to the silence it exposes in speech. This course will consider the Orphic tradition and its aftermath as seen in Rilke’s and Celan’s work. Special attention will be paid to the status of the unsayable (das Unsägliche for Rilke, das Unsagbare for Celan) in both writer’s poetry, prose and translations, especially from the French.