Abstract
The game, with its creative potential and rich semantics, has repeatedly animated writers’ imagination, motivating them to imagine new worlds or to present the experience of the existent world according to other rules. Beyond this, games have been perceived as a form of transposing traumatic experiences or an expression of heteronomy in man’s relation with destiny. The dice game appears in Paul Celan’s early poetry, but it is more present in late poems. The present paper analyses the semantics of the dice game in Celan’s poetry, trying to evidentiate its ontological and poetical values.