Memory Rose into Threshold Speech
The Collected Earlier Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.
Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan’s reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, "to measure the area of the given and the possible."
Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction and extensive commentary. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.
This volume collects Celan’s first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose).
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This ambitious bilingual edition completes Joris's herculean effort to translate all of Celan's poetry into English. Celan's experiences of trauma as a Holocaust survivor permeate poems such as "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"): "Black milk of dawn we drink you at night/ we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland/ we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink." Celan expresses the propulsive, hypnotic unraveling of the world through his fragmented refrain. Elsewhere, he paints himself as a perpetual outsider: "Blacker in black, I am more naked./ Only as a renegade am I faithful./ I am you when I am I." The importance of seeing and witnessing comes up again and again throughout: "Gaze-trade, finally, at untime:/ imagefast,/ lignified,/ the retina :/ the eternity-sign." Joris's introduction and commentary provide useful historical and literary context. This admirable translation presents the early work of an eminent German language postwar poet to a new audience.
