Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan FROM OUR EDITORS
Our Review
Imagine making beautiful poems out of the deepest horror. Paul Celan's haunting "Deathfugue," considered the major poem about the Holocaust, accomplishes just that. No other poem so masterfully treads the line between good and evil, using mere hair color as the delineator between those who lived and those who died.
Now, John Felstiner, the Stanford professor who brought that unforgettable poem into English, has given us a hefty collection of Celan's poems in translation -- easily the largest group ever available to English readers. For those moved by "Deathfugue" but less than comfortable with German, there's finally a way to read much of Celan at once.
Celan's poems are always relevant because they make humanity itself their audience. "Deathfugue," for example, includes all of us in its pain -- killed and killer, bystander and witness:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
The book includes never-before-translated poems as well as familiar favorites. English readers finally get to read poems like "There Was Earth Inside Them," which takes the biblical premise of coming from earth and returning to earth and pushes it as far as it can go:
There was earth inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and dug, and
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.
Celan was a boy in Nazi-occupied Romania when he went to a friend's to sleep over. When he returned, the door to his home was sealed and his parents were gone. He never saw them again. Both that door and Celan's parents -- their voices, their mannerisms, their murders -- became the materials of poem after poem.
After the war, Celan remained in Europe and wrote in German, for many, the hated language of the conqueror or, in Felstiner's words, "a mother tongue that had suddenly turned into his mother's murderers' tongue." This challenge, Felstiner believes, is part of why Celan felt compelled to write in German.
Felstiner has spent 20 years trying to understand Celan. The first product of that project was a biography of Celan, titled Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. Because Celan's life is so embedded in his work, Felstiner's knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his biography shines through on every page, enriching the poems.
Felstiner did his homework. He describes long nights in Celan's library, thumbing through books that looked particularly used, perusing Celan's notes and scrutinizing his scribbles in both Hebrew and German. Felstiner tells of 3am conversations with Celan's artist wife, Giselle. He even writes about a talk with Celan's son, in which Felstiner asks for permission to print the most private of notes.
This reaches a crescendo when Felstiner puts himself in Celan's shoes, wondering if Celan should have moved to Israel, as so many survivors did. One question is always present: Was there a way to prevent Celan's eventual suicide, when he drowned himself in the Seine in 1970?
For Celan, life and poetry were as closely related as life and death. He gave everything he had to the work, writing poems in the ghetto and in forced labor. In Felstiner's hands, Celan's poems remain at once spare and lush, gorgeous and frightening. There is an intimacy to these translations, a voice that comes out of close connection.
Again and again, Celan revisits his central subject, and Felstiner follows him. As the decades pass and Celan becomes a more powerful poet, he continues to hear his dead parents' voices, and he continues to mine their fates, searching the Bible, all of Jewish tradition, and much of Western culture for a way to make art out of tragedy. In the poems and in their English translations, despite all the destruction, there is one success -- at least in the space of the poems, humanity lives on.
Contributing editor Aviya Kushner is the poetry editor of Neworld magazine and has served as poetry coordinator for AGNI magazine. Her writing on poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review and The Boston Phoenix, and her essays on individual poems have been published in Poetry for Students, the college textbook on poetry. She has given readings of her own work throughout the United States and can be reached at AviyaK@aol.com.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the eastern European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, perished at Nazi hands, he wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue," 1945), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, Celan died a suicide in 1970
FROM THE CRITICS
Elie Wiesel
John Felstiner's brilliant translation brings us closer to Paul Celan's tormented and melodious universe.
John Bayley
Felstiner translates ... brilliantly. —New York Review of Books
Talk
This collection...is a great introduction to one of modern poetry's unforgettable voices.
New York Times Book Review
Respectful, nuanced renderings...invaluable for classroom use and for all readers interested in the full range of Celan's writing.
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 simplistic--sometimes macabre or witty--style 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 poetics--away 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 Cahners Business Information.
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