Review by Choice Review
"The end thinks us the beginning." Paul Celan stands alongside Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and Réné Char, but he goes beyond them by pointing to, by writing, poetry that lies "north of the future." Celan begins in earnest the interminable death march of poetry, a procession on which it has been unknowingly engaged since its inception. One might call this "poetry against poetry" or ''poetry at war with itself." In the present seminal volume, Joris-Celan's best translator-has assembled bilingual editions of Celan's last three published volumes and the three posthumous collections that followed. In addition, Joris provides a 70-page introduction that is essential to all readers of Celan along with 169 pages of detailed commentary in which he points out relevant criticism, indicates alternate renderings, and discusses Joris's own earlier translations of many of these poems. Celan's poetry focuses on a new (and very ancient) kind of light: the light of "the other's Other," the dark, invisible light beyond all fictions of the abyssal non-origin of being, time, and space. Poetry suffers from what Celan calls Lichtzwang, "light duress," which has prevented poetry from "darkening over" to its essence. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Ned Lukacher, emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Paul Celan (1920-70) was a celebrated translator and a poet recognized as one of the twentieth century's greatest writing in German, alongside Rainer Maria Rilke. Celan's work is defined by his experiences during WWII, including segregation into a Romanian ghetto, the deportation and death of his parents, and imprisonment in a Nazi labor camp. While Celan's early work is characterized by lyrically complex and emotionally intense verse, the tone and tenor of his poetry shifted dramatically as he moved away from the immediacy of wartime memories and began to write out of an urgency to reinvent his mother tongue through enigmatic lines and German neologisms. Nearly every page of this comprehensive bilingual edition includes wild, bewildering jewels: Down melancholy's rapids / past the blank woundmirror: There the forty / stripped lifetrees are rafted, and the bloodsugar-pea, x-rayable / by fingernails, / rotates. Such odd, disorienting turns make for page after page of challenging poetry, and master translator Joris' extensive introduction and commentary provide vital context for readers less familiar with Celan's linguistic audacity. A priceless compendium.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Hard to forget and harder to interpret, the dense and astonishing poems of Paul Celan (1920-1970) stand near the center of postwar European letters, and of Jewish writing after the Holocaust. This first appearance in English of the complete late volumes arrives thanks to a poet well suited to the task. Joris, a celebrated and prolific Luxembourger-American writer, has been translating Celan since 1967 and here finds beautiful-or terrifying-correlates for Celan's wrenched and recombinant speech. Celan, raised amid many languages, spoke German at home. The Nazis killed his parents and held the poet in a labor camp until the end of the war. Celan settled in Paris, but wrote his poems in German. The later poems-six books, three of them posthumous-comprise new compounds, alienated images, hauntingly crystallized phrases that sound like nobody's native tongue: critics find in them responses to the Holocaust, an "excavated heart," a civilization beyond repair. To read Joris's Celan is to see not only the insights and the horrors, but also intimacy, sexual jealousy, irony, even humor and hope. The exemplary en face edition also presents all the German; Joris provides a careful introduction and ample, learned notes. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
