Author(s): Paul Celan

Poetry

Translated by the prizewinning translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the publication of<i> Breathturn into Timestead</i>, Paul Celan’s collected later poetry. Finally, Celan’s readers are able to read his work in full, with a new introduction and expert commentary from Joris. Celan, a Romanian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, displays his sharp ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies.

The work, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In <i>Memory Rose into Threshold Speech</i>, the reader witnesses Celan's poems, which start lush with surrealistic imagery and become pared down, with the syntax growing tighter and his trademark neologisms and word-creations increasing. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.

This volume includes <i>Sprachgitter</i>, <i>Die Niemandsrose</i>, <i>Mohn und Gedachtnis</i>, and <i>Von schwelle zu Schwelle</i>.