Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan [Paperback]

Paul Celan (Author), John Felstiner (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2001

The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet, including previously unpublished writings.

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 This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose.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 New York Review of Books, "Felstiner translates ... brilliantly."

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

Felstiner translates ... brilliantly. -- John Bayley, author of Elegy for Iris, in New York Review of Books

John Felstiner's brilliant translation brings us closer to Paul Celan's tormented and melodious universe. -- Elie Wiesel

Respectful, nuanced renderings...invaluable for classroom use and for all readers interested in the full range of Celan's writing. -- New York Times Book Review

This collection...is a great introduction to one of modern poetry's unforgettable voices. -- Talk

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (December 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393322246
• ISBN-13: 978-0393322248
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The light and the Light, December 9, 2000

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Hardcover)

I bought this book after reading a single line--"the light and the Light." Felstiner renders Celan's notoriously intricate verse into poems so direct and luminous that you might mistake them for having been written in English. I also appreciated the spare notes; he trusts you and the poems to find each other on your own, and doesn't try to footnote away the mystery. I'm grateful for a book that makes Celan's beauty, sadness and experiment so visible in English. A labor of light.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good bilingual edition, April 22, 2002

By 

Nessander - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Hardcover)

Paul Celan is now considered one of the great postwar poets, perhaps the greatest poet to come out of the Holocaust, and the 2nd most influential German poet after Rilke. His most famous poem, "Todesfuge" (Deathfugue) is considered the most important poem on the Holocaust.

But beyond all that hyperbolic praise lies a poet who defies easy description, whose poetry is both demanding, difficult, beautiful and lyrical, and who deserves to be read by a wider audience.

Felstiner provides us with one of the 2 best bilingual editions of Celan's most important work (the other is by Michael Hamburger), and supplements it with a very well written introduction and translations of Celan's most important prose writings, including the Buchner speech "The Meridian". These prose pieces will be essential for students of Celan, and cast an important light on the poems.

The translations of the poems themselves are quite good, and at times brilliant, such as the innovative way that Felstiner translates "Deathfugue," subtly interweaving the original German more and more in the repetitions of the chorus until the poem ends with two lines entirely in German. The effect is chilling. Felstiner deserves the translation award he won for this book solely on the basis of this one poem, which shocked me anew when I read it in his English translation.

If you are unfamiliar with Celan up to now, this is a good place to start. If you are already an admirer of Celan's poems, this will be a welcome addition to your library. See also Felstiner's biography on Celan, "Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew".

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars bloody snow poems, May 18, 2002

By 

"hirofantv" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Hardcover)

This is a great, highly satisfying translation of the poetry of a tortured genius whose voice rang through holocaust death camps into 21st century living rooms. The metaphors of Celan are of tragic acuity, & his tropes & experiments will keep you awake at night. He didn't write to avoid the real world. He wrote so that he could clench in his sore fists the very world that clenched him in its. The prose selections at the end of the book, speeches he gave, are also very, very interesting & provide a different angle by which to view his great mind, of how he spoke when not funneling the thinking into a certain art.