This paper explores connections between poetry, art and architecture, which emerge across works by the poet Paul Celan, the German artist Anselm Kiefer and architect Daniel Libeskind, in order to foreground the ways in which our creations may bridge written language and speech, touch and space. Transformations of Celan’s poem Todesfuge into the paintings Nuremburg and Sulamith by Anselm Kiefer and the architectural spaces of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin, not only ensure the life of the poem through translation but demonstrate how historical quotations emerge across varying material combinations and space. In particular, this paper explores how metonymic fragments and the interplay between presence and absence inherent to Celan’s poetics appear in the multivalent imagery and use of paint, straw and ash in Kiefer’s paintings, as well as in the interstitial “spatial voids” of Libeskind’s Museum. Understanding these connections demonstrates the critical potential of our artefacts: art, architecture, written and spoken language, to fluctuate between what is spoken and unsaid, what is seen and left unseen, between the visible and invisible.