Breathturn into Timestead
The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Paul Celan, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, created an oeuvre that stands as testimony to the horrors of his times and as an attempt to chart a topography for a new, uncontaminated language and world. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris.
This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual . . . ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won."
Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. The work is that of a witness and a visionary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
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