Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Paul. Celan (Author), Nikolai Popov (Translator), Heather McHugh (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series | Publication Date: February 25, 2004

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work--his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though fluent in a number of languages, Celan (1920-1970), who had come to Paris from Romanian Bukovina, pointedly wrote in German after WWII. His decomposition and recasting of that language, through a style that can seem dizzying in its complex poly-referentiality, was compounded by his erudition, by his own history as a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in the camps, and finally by his suicide. For many, he one of the major poets of the 20th century. Though Celan's work presents obvious difficulties for any translator, his English-language readers have long been well-served by Michael Hamburger's starkly graceful selected translations (Poems of Paul Celan, Persea), which remain the best available, and more recently, by Pierre Joris's acute renderings of Celan's later work. Of the new collections here, 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 Hamburger's selection, 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. Popov and McHugh's collection also ranges over Celan's oeuvre, but far less comprehensively or successfully. Unlike Felstiner and Joris, Popov (The Russian People Speak: Democracy at the Crossroads) and poet McHugh (Father of the Predicaments, etc.) don't present the German texts en face, a practice they regard, in their preface, as a potential distraction from the reader's experience of their renderings. It would indeed be a distraction, making painfully clear just how far they depart from the originals to arrive at their idiosyncratic versions, which alter Celan's precise line and stanza lengths significantly, and forsake Celan's vertiginous difficulties for a more simplisticAsometimes macabre or wittyAstyle that's littered with heavy-handed gestures. One poem, for example, contains an ex nihilo insertion gleefully riffing on a German pun, others tip the scales of Celan's carefully weighted pronouns into one viewpoint or another. Even when hewing closer to the source text, Popov and McHugh incessantly heighten the poems' language, degrading their thorniness with more traditional sentiments. Fortunately, many of the poems translated by Popov and McHugh can be found in Joris's new volume, or in his 1995 rendering of Celan's Breathturn, both of which present entire books in razor-sharp, finely nuanced translations. Threadsuns represents the continuation of a marked turn in Celan's poeticsAaway from lusher effusions to intensely compressed, increasingly stark investigations of language, history and the poet's own capacities. Because much of this later work is serial in nature, Joris's decision to render the books in their entirety is profoundly important, and helps to make them necessary complements to Hamburger's selections. While it may not consistently attain the dazzling heights and depths of Celan's finest work in Breathturn and 1963's The No-One's Rose, Threadsuns contains an abundance of brilliant poems and provides ample evidence for the magnitude of Celan's stature in the last century, and in the one to come. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"In 'Glottal Stop,' the translators...take greater risks...but the poetic rewards are...at times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound..." --Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review

"Heather McHugh, herself a renowned poet, has an ear for the dense and difficult music of Celan's language, and one can hear overtones of her distinctive voice . . . Nikolai Popov, a Joyce scholar, is present here too, bringing his 'logician's nature' to bear on Celan's labyrinthine philosophical gestures. The tug-of-war between these impulses toward lyric intimacy and analytical distance mirrors the tension between Celan's love of language and his knowledge of its limitations. The result is something like a volume of Heidegger into which someone has slipped a handful of achingly beautiful love letters . . . It is a broken, distinctly human music that Popov and McHugh render in English in Glottal Stop." --Voice Literary Supplement

"The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative."--J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

"If any American poet can render Celan's knotty German into English it's McHugh, who's justly praised for her linguistic facility and quickness. Couple this with Popov's scholarly notes and annotations -- he seems to have tracked down nearly every conceivable reference embedded in these poems -- and the result is a thrilling excursion that gives the lie to the long-standing belief that late Celan is untranslatable."--San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (February 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819567205
• ISBN-13: 978-0819567208
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #482,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars what publisher's weekly said above, May 25, 2004

By 

Joe Omalley (san francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

As Publisher's Weekly said Popov and McHugh "don't present the German texts en face, a practice they regard, in their preface, as a potential distraction from the reader's experience of their renderings. It would indeed be a distraction, making painfully clear just how far they depart from the originals to arrive at their idiosyncratic versions"

I don't know any German and even I could tell something was fishy. For example, for the poem on page 5, Popov and McHugh state that the German word "neige" means "remainder", "end" or "dregs". They select none of these choices for their translation and because there is no facing German it took me 10 minutes to find what word they did use. (I think it is "neighing" because neige "moves in the nearness" of the english word neigh.)

The endnotes are truly Kinbotian. Celan's late poems resist meaning, but not to Popov and McHugh. They understand it all.

It is sad that this book won the 2001 Griffin International Prize for poetry. Luckily, Amazon has a good deal on a four-volume set of Paul Celan's poetry, including Breathturn, Threadsuns and Lightduress, translated by Pierre Joris which I will move into nearness as soon as it is released.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtless, April 9, 2009

By 

DabblerArts (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I agree with the previous review. I've read Hamburger's translations before, and will get that book now instead. This is really distorted stuff; and frankly I think it's crass, to inflict on another's poems so much of your own invention. I'm writing this to warn those who might consider buying this for the Celan.

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Astounding book, October 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

This is a superb collection of poems by one of the world's truly great poets. This is one of the better translations I've read with the authors doing an admirable job of turning Celan's German into a very readable English that still manages to capture Celan's haunting style.