Poems of Paul Celan
"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric…Michael Hamburger has earned our gratitude for rendering these poems into a reasonably inventive English…"Robert Pinsky, THE NEW REPUBLIC.
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"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric Michael Hamburger has earned our gratitude for rendering these poems into a reasonably inventive English "Robert Pinsky, THE NEW REPUBLIC.George SteinerOne's gratitude for [Hamburger's] Celan versions...is unstinted. —New Yorker
\ George SteinerOne's gratitude for [Hamburger's] Celan versions...is unstinted. —New Yorker\ \ \ \ \ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ This bilingual edition spans the great and tragic German poet's career from 1920 until his suicide in 1970. In much of the work, ``Celan writes about the Holocaust--though by contrast and allusion--in poems that are dark, sharply felt and authentic . . . economical in the extreme,'' determined PW. (Nov.)\ \ \ Library JournalCryptic. Paradoxical. Difficult. These are words that award-winning translator Hamburger uses to describe Celan's poems. A Romanian Jew who lost his parents in the Holocaust, Celan survived--until committing suicide in 1970--to produce an impressive body of work. Possessed by a terrifying vision, his poems in this expanded and revised bilingual edition of an earlier and now-out-of-print collection nevertheless do not express the terror overtly. But we feel it in the tensions his lines create. Celan does not give us confessional poetry; it is his power to lead us to his private vision, the stuff of all great poetry, that makes his a voice we must learn to hear. Here is an artistry to cherish, and Hamburger is to be applauded for his superb translations of a major poet.-- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.\ \
