Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.