Awards
Selected as one of the Best Books of 2001 by the New York Times Book Review.
Synopses & Reviews
The most wide-ranging bilingual volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet, including youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose.
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the east-European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at Nazi hands, he wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue," 1945), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, Celan for twenty-five years persisted in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance not seen before in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
This rich new selection contains more than any previous one, including for the first time Celan's youthful lyrics plus unpublished poems found after his death. Also included are lucid versions of the poet's three major speeches and his whimsical prose fiction, "Conversation in the Mountains." An engraving by Gis`ele Celan-Lestrange, echoing her husband's texts, is reproduced here, along with hitherto unpublished Celan manuscripts.
John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work.
Review
"For many, [Celan] was one of the major poets of the 20th century....Of the new collections...the volume from Celan biographer and critic Felstiner is easily the most comprehensive, containing ample cullings from all of Celan's books, including many poems not included in [previous collections], along with previously untranslated early and late work and four prose pieces. Felstiner handles these translations competently, rendering Celan in a somewhat more colloquial style than Hamburger or Joris. But his shifting diction (including 'Thou') and his tendency to capitalize nouns and to let German words stand untranslated in the English text can make for a distracting admixture, as it does in Celan's much-anthologized early work, 'Deathfugue': 'Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night/ we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland.' On the whole, Felstiner's efforts often pale beside those of Hamburger and Joris, but the page count of this dual-language collection will make it the default choice of those who will buy only one Celan volume." Publishers Weekly
Review
"John Felstiner's brilliant translation brings us closer to Paul Celan's tormented and melodious universe." Elie Wiesel
Review
"This collection...is a great introduction to one of modern poetry's unforgettable voices." Talk
Review
"John Felstiner is the author of the indispensable biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, and he has been working on the translations in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan for more than two decades. Respectful, nuanced renderings, his translations steer a middle course between Joris's literalism and the daring liberties that Celan took in his own translations of Mandelstam, Dickinson, and Valéry. This collection usefully gathers poems from all periods of Celan's life as well as his sparse but illuminating prose pieces; it should prove invaluable for classroom use and for all readers interested in the full range of Celan's writing. In a sense these translations offer a second biography, distilled down to its essential poetic utterances and to what Felstiner sees as their biographical core of suffering and loss." Mark M. Anderson, New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages. John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work. John Bayley wrote in the , "Felstiner translates ... brilliantly."
Synopsis
The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet, including previously unpublished writings.
About the Author
Paul Celan, born in 1920 in Czernowitz, northern Romania, lost his mother and father overnight in a Nazi deportation, then spent nineteen months at forced labor, while his parents were killed. After the war, a German-Speaking Jewish exile in Paris, he married a French artist and had a son, taught at the E'cole Normale Supe'rieure, translated forcefully from six languages, and wrote poetry that won him Germany's major literary prizes, ranking him with Ho'lderlin and Rilke. But Celan's Holocuast trauma, plus German neo-Nazism, afflicted him even as his creativity persisted. He took his own life in l970, at the age of 49.
John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the MLA's James Russell Lowell prize, and recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. It was named a book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Village Voice. He is also the author of Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, recipient of the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal and teaches at Stanford University.