Paul Celan

Translated by John Felstiner

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan

The most wide-ranging bilingual volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet, including youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose.

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the east-European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at Nazi hands, he wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue," 1945), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, Celan for twenty-five years persisted 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 not seen before in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

This rich new selection contains more than any previous one, including for the first time Celan's youthful lyrics plus unpublished poems found after his death. Also included are lucid versions of the poet's three major speeches and his whimsical prose fiction, "Conversation in the Mountains." An engraving by Gis`ele Celan-Lestrange, echoing her husband's texts, is reproduced here, along with hitherto unpublished Celan manuscripts.

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."

Paul Celan, born in 1920 in Czernowitz, northern Romania, lost his mother and father overnight in a Nazi deportation, then spent nineteen months at forced labor, while his parents were killed. After the war, A German-Speaking Jewish exile in Paris, he married a French artist and had a son, taught at the E'cole Normale Supe'rieure, translated forcefully from six languages, and wrote poetry that won him Germany's major literary prizes, ranking him with Ho'lderlin and Rilke. But Celan's Holocuast trauma, plus German neo-Nazism, afflicted him even as his creativity persisted. He took his own life in l970, at the age of 49.

John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the MLA's James Russell Lowell prize, and recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. It was named a book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Village Voice. He is also the author of Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, recipient of the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal and teaches at Stanford University.

2000 / Cloth / ISBN 0-393-04999-X / 416 pages / 6" x 9" / Poetry