Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan

by Paul Celan, translated by john felstiner

published	December 2001 by W. W. Norton & Company
binding	Paperback
isbn	0393322246 (isbn13: 9780393322248)
ebook
pages	416
description	The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet. Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. Soon...more [close] The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet. 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 This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose.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." [close]
date added	02-22-07 edit book

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(review of isbn 039304999X)

03/10/08

Read in March, 2008

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 hi...more 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....less

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