Synopses & Reviews
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the first four books of the celebrated poet Paul Celan's oeuvre which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.
Translated by the prizewinning translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Paul Celan's collected later poetry. Finally, Celan's readers are able to read his work in full, with a new introduction and expert commentary from Joris. Celan, a Romanian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, displays his sharp ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies.
The work, however, is not only reflective: There is in Celan a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the reader witnesses Celan's poems, which start lush with surrealistic imagery and become pared down, with the syntax growing tighter and his trademark neologisms and word-creations increasing. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.
This volume comprises Mohn und Gedachtnis, Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, Sprachgitter, and Die Niemandsrose.
Review
"This ambitious bilingual edition completes Joris's herculean effort to translate all of Celan's poetry into English...This admirable translation presents the early work of an eminent German language postwar poet to a new audience." — Publishers Weekly
Review
"What a privilege to read Paul Celan, one of the great voices of contemporary poetry, through Pierre Joris." — Katherine Hedeen, Kenyon Review
Review
"Compiling Celan's first four books into one volume highlights his growth as a writer and thinker, paring language to its essentials." — The New York Times
About the Author
Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, in 1920, and is widely considered to be one of the most innovative poets of the twentieth century. A German-speaking Jew, he was sent to a forced labor camp during World War II. Celan settled in Paris in 1948, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1970.
Pierre Joris has written, edited, and translated more than sixty books, including poetry, essays, and anthologies, such as Fox-trails, -tails, & -trots (Poems & Proses); Paul Celan's Microliths They Are, Little Stones: Posthumous Prose; Arabia (not so) Deserta; and, with Adonis, Conversations in the Pyrenees. He is the editor and translator of Paul Celan's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry. In 2005 Joris received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Celan's Lichtzwang (Lightduress), and in 2020 he received Luxembourg's Batty Weber Prize for lifetime achievement.