Customer Reviews

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan

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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.

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".

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.

An excellent translation of one of the great voices of modern poetry. Celan, perhaps more than any other poet, bore witness to the destruction of humanity by the Nazi German regime. His poems sear through the heart like no other. One of he greatest works, "Deathfugue" or "Todesfuge" which resonates through the past throughout time:

"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark in Deutschland your golden hair
Margareta..."

I don't pretend to understand Celan intellectually. I don't know if a lifetime's worth of study and analysis can ultimately decipher what is innately indecipherable, but I suppose you can, in a way, make the same claim for the poetry of Dickinson and Crane..complex and powerful poetry with perhaps all too obvious driving forces, but with roots that tap into depths both private, and mysterious. But while my mind can't always make sense of language and verse so richly allusive, metaphoric, neologistic, and symbolic, my heart understands every jot and tittle. To me, Celan's poetry is simultaneously an anguished cry and triumphant shout from the ashes of the Holocaust. Using the favored language of his parents, the language of the poetry of Heine and Rilke that he and his beloved mother loved, the native language of her murderers, he twists, transmutes and ultimately transfigures it into a sublime artifice that allows him to go on living in the face of an unthinkable past, a cruel and hypocritical present, and an uncertain future that would tragically end under the waters of the Seine in 1970. Paul Celan thus becomes the greatest post WW2 poet of the German language. In his Bremen speech Celan wrote:

It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through it's own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this. In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.

The above mentioned difficulty with Celan is compounded by the fact that for the individual who cannot read German, much can be lost in translation. There is a distinctly different rhythm to German verse, and many German words have multiple meanings, some explicit and others oblique, which force translators into critical decisions in the selection process. I have read both Felstiner's and Joris's translations of Celan, and prefer the less literal method of Felstiner. A further bonus in this volume is having the original German text adjacent to the translations.

Paul Celan stands as one of the most influential and visible poets of the second half of the 20th-century. The work he produced from World War II to his suicide by drowning in 1970 has been lauded by subsequent poets, taught in German history courses, and set to music by Berio, Birtwistle, and Rihm. The central theme of most of Celan's poetry is the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, as the poet was born in a German-speaking Jewish enclave in Bucovina and there lost his parents and his home, scars which even a successful new life in Paris could never erase. This volume of selected poems with English translations by John Felstiner (author of the biography Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew) is a fine introduction to his work.

Celan's poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) is one of his earliest mature pieces and the most common introduction to his poetry. It's opening lines "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink / we shovel a grave in the air where you won't lie too cramped" are a powerful depiction of the death camps and fully repudiate Adorno's claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Some critics have claimed that "Todesfuge" was Celan's only great poem and had it not been for that, then we would have never heard of him. That poem was certainly his break into the literary world, but other material in this volume is just as fine. "Einfuehrung" (Stretto) is something of a rewriting of "Todesfuge" in considerably more desperate language and my favourite of Celan's poems. Here the motifs of the first poem are shattered into pieces ("Grass, written asunder. The stones, white / with the grassblades' ... Ashes. / Ashes. ashes. / Night. / Night-and-night.") which in turn are dissolved into their component atoms (Hurricanes, / Hurricanes, from all, / particle flurry...").

In "Tenebrae" Celan reverses the relationship of God and his people in Judaism and explicitly evokes the violence of the camps: "Near are we, Lord, / near and graspable. // Grasped already, Lord, / clawed into each other, as if / each of our bodies were your body, Lord." One of Celan's main concerns was how speech might remain meaningful when so much of life had become meaningless after the horrors of the war years. In "With a Changing Key" he writes: "With a changing key / you unlock the house where / the snow of what's silenced drifts ... Changing your key changes the word / that may drift with the flakes. / Just like that wind that rebuffs you, / packed round your word is the snow."

While much of Celan's work is haunting, I cannot make much of his last works. With the last collections he saw published in his lifetime ATEMWENDE (Breathturn) and FADENSONNEN (Threadsuns) his poetry became so hermitic and so obsessed with polysemy (multiple meanings) that it effectively means nothing. Take, for example, the poem "Coagula" which in its entirety reads: "Also your / wound, Rosa. // And the horns' light of your / Romanian buffaloes / in place of a star above the / sand bed, in the / outspeaking red / ashpotent / alembic."

Now, some of the linguistic games of these late poems are entertaining, but I cannot sketch them here because I'm assuming readers of this review have no German, and they indeed cannot be preserved in English. Like all translators, Felstiner has attempted to give the poems some intelligibility by basing his translations on our knowledge of Celan's life, but in doing so he collapses the possibilities inherent in the German text.

In reviewing this volume of selected poems, and consequently the poet's entire career, I'm not sure how to rate it overall and therefore have given it three stars. Celan is certainly a poet worth getting acquainted with, but I can't help feeling that he was going astray into irrelevance with the late poems that only the author himself would have understood. If you are a fan of modern European poetry, or interested in the Holocaust and its influence on literature, you might pick up Felstiner's translations if you cannot read the original German. Felstiner's translations and commentary might also appeal to those interested in Celan's Jewishness, the main concern of the translator.

I must say, however, that I rather prefer Michael Hamburger's selection Poems of Paul Celan. In its final edition, Hamburger translated slightly more poems than Felstiner. Hamburger was also able to make use of recent scholarship in translating "Coagula" which Felstiner didn't have access to. Finally, Hamburger's introduction and essay on translating Celan show the poet's linguistic brilliance.

I am not an expert reading of Celan. I do not know most of his poetry. I would not even know if I would assent to the claims made for its greatness, were they not made by such distinguished students of poetry.
I was once present at an evening in which 'Todesfugue ' was read translated and interpreted by the German- Hebrew translator Shimon Sandbank, and also interpreted by the critic of German Literature Siegfried Moses.
What struck me at the reading was the haunting horror rhythmically driven, the maddeningness and hypnotic quality of the poetry.
I also knew a woman in Jerusalem who knew Celan personally, had written a thesis on his poetry, and was absolutely devoted to his poetry which she believed to be beyond any other.
This large comprehensive work gives the reader an opportunity to contend with the greatest part of Celan's life-work.

I can't tell you what you have to read for yourself: A great Giant of a poet, whose work thankfully doesn't go out of print, for the best of reasons. He's a genius of first order.