From 1997 to 2000, my wife Andrea worked in the German Department at the University of Poitiers in France. One of the professors in the department, Daniel Poncin, studied German at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris in the early 1960s. One of his teachers was the Germanophone poet Paul Celan, who lived in Paris from 1948 until his suicide in 1970. Daniel showed me an assignment he had done with Celan's corrections and comments. A few days ago, in Bertrand Badiou's "Paul Celan: Eine Bildbiographie" (Suhrkamp, 2023), I came across a quotation from Celan's diary: "Poncin, blaue Krawatte, spielt mit rotweißen Bleistift" ("Poncin, blue tie, plays with a red-and-white pencil"). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 July 2025)