Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
by Paul Celan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Paul CelanTranslator: John Felstiner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12
ISBN: 0393322246
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
Book Review: Art from the ashes
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
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