Staff Pick
One of the great poets of the latter half of the 20th century, Celan was a Romanian Jew who survived the Holocaust. His poetry is a difficult and harrowing attempt to reckon with the lived experience of genocide. In a sense, many of his poems can be read as attempts to give voice to the bodiless dead: language itself is compressed and fragmented into gnostic observations, neologisms, and an intensely tragic personal symbolism, all of which seem to come from a deep well of suffering. And the reward for unraveling these dense poems is genuinely worth the effort. Celan never loses sight of the ultimate goal of this "deconstruction" of language: the necessity of giving beauty and expression to a terrible shadow of nonexistence that trails behind him. You will never find a body of experimental poetry that is as urgent, wise, and totally heart-wrenching.
Michael Hamburger's translations can be somewhat dry, but they are the most direct representations of the poems in the original German. Celan's language is incredibly dense and abstract, yet he never lapses into philosophical abstractions or bland proclamations. The poems are always alarming, bursting with viscerally surreal imagery and prophetic moans. Hamburger's translations avoid reducing Celan to merely a kind of postmodern theorist working within poems, yet the translations also lack an intensity and rawness. Recommended By Noah L., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
One of the greatest poets to ever write in German and among the most indispensable writers of the twentieth century in any language, Paul Celan's poems "embody a conviction that the truth of what has been broken and torn must be told with a jagged grace" (
Robert Pinsky, The New Republic). The essential poet of the Holocaust-a Jewish survivor writing in the language of his mortal enemy-Celan spent his creative life prodding language and disrupting syntax. His exquisitely distilled poems are manifestations of a primal agitation-each one a cry of human anguish in the face of incomprehensible suffering.
For more than thirty years, the peerless translations of Michael Hamburger have been English speakers' truest access to Celan. This crowning Celan-Hamburger edition-bilingual with facing English-German versions, revised and expanded to provide the full spectrum of Celan's verse-contains one hundred and seventy-two poems, fourteen of them previously unavailable. Among the additions is the remarkable threnody "Wolf's-Bean," accompanied by a Translator's Note on the poem.
Poems of Paul Celan concludes with the compelling essay, "On Translating Celan," in which Hamburger details his relationship with Celan's work and with Celan himself. Through the essay, and of course through the poems, this book offers readers an immersion into the troubled genius of this crucial poet.
Review
"Michael Hamburger's starkly graceful selected translations [of Paul Celan]...remain the best available."
Publishers Weekly, October 16, 2000
Review
"This new edition of Michael Hamburger's remarkable translations of Celan's poems provides not only a revised and expanded selection of this difficult poet's work but an introduction, postscript and notes that illuminate the arduous and exhilarating task of rendering Celan into English from the German....Celan's poems defy description. They require a searching translator to find, in English, the words that are nearly "equivalent" to those of his haunted poems. Hamburger is that translator." Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
The peerless translations of this haunted and haunting Holocaust poet, including ten new poems and an illuminating essay by the translator. Paul Celan is one the twentieth century's most essential poets, and twenty-two years after its publication, Poems of Paul Celan continues to be the single truest access for English-speakers to this poet's work. This new edition adds ten more poems and a significant essay, "On Translating Celan" by Michael Hamburger.
Synopsis
The classic translation, is revised and expanded, featuring new poems and an essay by the translator. It is the foremost English-language edition of the great poet.
About the Author
Paul Celan was born into a Jewish family in Romania in 1920. Although neither of his parents survived the Holocaust, Celan managed to escape to France (after eighteen months in a labor camp) where he spent his most productive years, writing and translating poetry. He remained in Paris, garnering international acclaim for his writing, until his death by suicide in 1970.
Michael Hamburger is a distinguished poet, critic, and translator. For translations of Paul Celan's poetry contained in this book, he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1981; in 1986, he received the Goethe medal for his services to German literature. He is the author of scores of books, including the recent Collected Poems 1941-1994, Intersections: Shorter Poems 1994-2000, and Philip Larkin: A Retrospect; and, forthcoming, From a Diary of Non-Events (a book-length poem), and a translation of W. G. Sebald's After Nature. He lives in Saxmundham, Suffolk, England.