What do you think?
Rate this book
Paul Celan. Eine Biographie.
Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems—including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"—plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems.To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
17 people are currently reading
506 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 1, 2023
I have quite a few things to say on fate, evil, gift and craft based upon this book and also this one Correspondence. I might do later. But for now I just wanted these two poems speak...
Corona
Autumn nibbles its leaf right from my hand: we're friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
Time turns back to its shell.
In the mirror is Sunday,
in dream goes sleeping,
the mouth speaks true.
My eye goes down to my lover's loins:
we gaze at each other.
we say dark things,
we love one another like poppy and memory,
we slumber like wine in the seashells,
like the sea in the moon blood-beam.
We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street:
It's time people knew!
It's time the stone consented to bloom,
a heart beat for unrest.
It's time it came time.
It is time.
by Paul Celan (1952)
translated by John Felstiner
Autumn day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Stretch out your shadow on the sundial's face,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.
Command the last fruits to be full in time;
grant them even two more southerly days,
press them toward fulfilment soon and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will build none.
Who is alone now, will stay long alone,
will lie awake, read, get long letter written,
and though the streets that follow up and down
will wander restless, when the leaves are driven.
by Rilke (1902)
the same translator
Exactly 50 years and two wars earlier...
Corona
Autumn nibbles its leaf right from my hand: we're friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:
Time turns back to its shell.
In the mirror is Sunday,
in dream goes sleeping,
the mouth speaks true.
My eye goes down to my lover's loins:
we gaze at each other.
we say dark things,
we love one another like poppy and memory,
we slumber like wine in the seashells,
like the sea in the moon blood-beam.
We stand at the window embracing, they watch from the street:
It's time people knew!
It's time the stone consented to bloom,
a heart beat for unrest.
It's time it came time.
It is time.
by Paul Celan (1952)
translated by John Felstiner
Autumn day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Stretch out your shadow on the sundial's face,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.
Command the last fruits to be full in time;
grant them even two more southerly days,
press them toward fulfilment soon and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will build none.
Who is alone now, will stay long alone,
will lie awake, read, get long letter written,
and though the streets that follow up and down
will wander restless, when the leaves are driven.
by Rilke (1902)
the same translator
Exactly 50 years and two wars earlier...
June 26, 2015
Here is Michael Hofmann's review from the LRB, rescued from behind the pay-wall:
Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up). His upbringing reflected the family’s Jewish traditions, but also the deep love of German literature and culture that was often found, especially in Jewish populations, in the Eastern marches of Austria-Hungary (think of the Galician, Joseph Roth). In Celan’s case, this came to him from his mother: German was, in every sense, his mother-tongue. Already as a boy, he loved poetry, first Goethe and Schiller, then Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Kafka and in particular Rilke. He spoke German, Hebrew, Romanian and some Yiddish and was obviously an exceptional linguist, later translating poetry from Russian, English, French and Italian. And yet, when he came to write, he had no real alternative to German: ‘Poetry – that is the fateful uniqueness of language,’ he wrote. Only slightly younger Jewish writers like Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis – a fellow Bukovinan – emigrated to Israel and wrote their poetry in Hebrew: Celan couldn’t. It is what gives his poetry its desperate distinction. ‘There is nothing in the world,’ Celan said, ‘for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew, and the language of his poems is German.’
In 1938 he went as a student to France – still thinking to study medicine – but he returned home the following year committed to literature and philology. When the war started, Czernowitz was occupied first by Russian troops and then by the Germans and their Romanian allies. The Antschels were put in a ghetto and got out of it, but in the summer of 1942 his parents were picked up and taken to a Nazi labour camp in Transnistria – one of the bleak, almost nonce names of South-Eastern Europe. Celan himself was fortuitously absent. His father died there, after a few months, of typhoid fever, and his mother was murdered – shot in the neck – by the Germans for being unfit to work. ‘These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experiences of his life,’ writes Pierre Joris in a biographical note. Celan himself did forced labour. When the Russians retook the Bukovina, he went back to Czernowitz. In 1945, having anagrammatised himself to Paul Celan, he was in Bucharest, where an early version of his most celebrated poem, ‘Todesfuge’, came out in a friend’s Romanian translation: it was his first publication. In 1947, he went west to Vienna. The following year, he settled in Paris, where he worked as a translator and taught – German – at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He married the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange in 1952; they had a son, Eric (having lost another in infancy), and lived in Paris and Normandy, Celan teaching and publishing poems. He visited Germany fairly frequently for professional reasons, giving readings and receiving awards, and in 1969 paid a short but intense visit to Israel. In April 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine.
Celan published six substantial volumes of poetry in his lifetime, of which Atemwende (Breathturn) was the fifth; three more appeared posthumously. A selection from these posthumous books, called Last Poems and published by North Point in 1986, was made by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin. Michael Hamburger has published translations from Celan in increasing volume since a 1972 Selected from Penguin; Poems of Paul Celan, containing work from every one of Celan’s nine volumes, is published by Anvil and Persea. All the English editions – except the old Penguin – have parallel texts. All of them too, I think, make some appeal to Celan’s own activity as a translator – Shakespeare’s sonnets, Emily Dickinson, Mandelstam, Blok, Yesenin, Apollinaire, Valéry, Supervielle, Ungaretti – to validate their own efforts. A scholarly edition of Celan, obviously an exceptionally difficult and delicate undertaking, has been underway in Germany for some years. In the meantime he is surely the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons.
John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five dozen poems, the two acceptance speeches of 1958 (the City of Bremen Literature Prize) and 1960 (the Georg Büchner Prize), and the 1959 prose piece ‘Conversation in the Mountains’. When Felstiner ends: ‘From first to last his poems stand’ – a crucial verb in Celan – and follows that with four pages of lines from Celan’s poems, with their dates, from 1938 to 1970, it is like getting a dramatis personae; and when the reader feels, at each line or fragment, a pang of recognition, orientation and emotion, it is a tribute to what Felstiner has achieved in mediating and explicating these urgent and often enigmatic writings.
To anyone raised on Anglo-American biographies of the sort that know everything about their subject and will say anything, Felstiner’s propriety and lack of intrusiveness come as quite a shock. His gentle approach seems to push Celan back into a more dignified past: it is strange to think he died just two years before John Berryman, whose hospitalisations, marriages, alcoholism and so on are all common knowledge – not least because Berryman wrote about them himself. As Hamburger says, Celan ‘had hardly any use for realism of a kind that merely imitates and reproduces, for what Northrop Frye has called “the low mimetic”’. He never wrote anything like Berryman’s ‘I didn’t – I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade’ and the corollary is that we aren’t now being told what Celan liked for breakfast. We don’t know with what feelings or even exactly when he went to his death, nor can we picture the scene on 27 June 1942 when his parents were taken away. In part, it is Celan’s difficulty and delicacy that continue to protect him from any intrusiveness. A poem in Breathturn begins, ‘Temple-pincers, eyed by your cheekbone’. Felstiner conjectures it might be about shock therapy. But it’s good not to know, or rather not to be told for sure – and all these dark and heavy biographical facts are left to accrue to the benefit of the poems (and out of range of the trivialisation and inquisition of biography). It is striking, too, how people who knew Celan talk about him in terms that are reminiscent of his own poems. At times, their statements show a mastery of one of his own favourite forms, paradox: his style of reading aloud, with ‘a cold heat’; the poet Henri Michaux’s laconic Möbius-ism ‘we spoke so as not to have to speak’; or Emmanuel Lévinas’s Dickinsonian remark that Celan’s poems testified to his – stunning phrase – ‘Insomnia in the bed of Being’. Clearly, no one is about to write a knock-down-drag-out biography of Paul Celan; in fact Felstiner’s book is the nearest there has yet been to anything of the kind.
Still, it is not biography that is the motor for Poet, Survivor, Jew, but translation. Translation in the service of comprehension, not as its own end (it makes, I think, all the difference in the world). Thus, Felstiner comes to a poem, offers his English version of it, explaining his priorities and choices, rejoicing in his successes and lamenting his failures, the impossibilities and the imponderables, gives the background to the poem – the imagery, the experience behind it, Celan’s reading, inaccessible allusions and bits of word-play – and goes on. In a sense, the translation is the least conspicuous part of the process; it seems to abolish itself, it is just the vector that delivers the poem. I kept thinking what a roundabout way of doing things this was, how much more straightforward and strictly focused if the whole thing had been kept to German, as poem plus elucidation – but actually it works like a charm. (And it does bring in an English readership: Felstiner’s book assumes no German on the reader’s part, while managing to make it continually available – perhaps the single most wonderful thing about what he does.) As he observes in his Introduction, ‘to grow attentive, especially in translating, is to activate these poems.’ Primarily, then, the translating is for Felstiner’s own benefit: it keeps him honest and up to the mark, it leaves him all the time exposed (as Celan said, ‘poetry exposes itself’), and the continual friction between the languages gives him energy and material. It remains a weird undertaking, this parallel action – a phantom operation, a powerplant with dummy fuel rods. In the context of his book, however, it makes sense: his enthusiasm, scholarship and literary sensitivity enrich these rods. It is crucial that we get not just the translations – inadequate, depleted and impossible as they almost invariably are with a poet like Celan, embedded in that ‘fateful uniqueness of language’ – but a sense of the things that need to be added to make them live. And for that, Felstiner deserves enormous credit.
On their own, the translations can indeed look a little odd. One has been done as a Dickinson pastiche. The most famous one, the version of ‘Deathfugue’ that Daniel Weissbort used in his anthology, The Poetry of Survival, where I first saw it, goes, as Weissbort describes it, ‘at certain crucial points, back into German, in an almost sacramental completion of the translational circle’. Fugally and incrementally, Felstiner incorporates the original, so that the last two and a half lines are exactly as Celan wrote them:
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod
ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein achenes Haar Sulamith
(Since they have been translated earlier on in the poem, there can be no possibility of not understanding them.) It is a way of acknowledging – and in a translation! – the untranslatability of Celan. How can the within/without, first/third-person ambivalence of ‘Deutschland’ be rendered by the unfreighted and external ‘Germany’ (with its distinct root of ‘Aleman-’ for ‘Teut-’, all cosy and Western)? What seems at first like a pointless stunt is in fact only doing in a performative way – and only here, in this of all Celan’s poems, ‘the Guernica of postwar European poetry’, Felstiner calls it – what Felstiner does throughout Poet, Survivor, Jew, which is to bring the German within reach of the English reader.
More striking, and more valuable than his translations, are the readings (of the necessary microscopic acuity) to which Felstiner subjects Celan’s poems. One of his odder words for Celan is ‘reliable’ – reminding me of Heaney’s sloes ‘bitter and dependable’, and then in turn of Celan’s almonds – and he uses it only once, but it stays with the reader, so that by the end of a book expounding (Katharine Washburn’s words) ‘small poems, speaking little, saying everything’, reliability has come to seem anything but a minor virtue. It is here that Felstiner’s book becomes incomparably, almost unimaginably – and finally suspiciously, even counter-productively – richer than reading someone’s English versions of the poems, or even the originals unassisted. Take ‘Tenebrae’, a transparently great poem in any language, not ‘hard’ but with a howling, desolating coldness to it: ‘Nah sind wir, Herr, / nahe und greifbar. // Gegriffen schon, Herr, / ineinander verkrallt, als wär / der Leib eines jeden von uns / dein Leib, Herr. // Bete, Herr, / bete zu uns, / wir sind nah.’ This is ferocious, terrifying in its insistence, and not a letter – the ‘e’ in ‘nahe’ – out of place. Michael Hamburger’s version goes:
We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Felstiner has it:
Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.
Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Hamburger’s fifth line is inelegant, and he loses the thudding ds and the gathering movement of ‘at hand’ to ‘handled’; then again, ‘handled’ is really not adequate for ‘gegriffen’, and Felstiner saves a little more of Celan’s terrifying dactylic metre. But where he really scores is in his sourcing of the poem in Scripture and theology, and, still more, of its fourth line, ‘ineinander verkrallt’ to the German translation of The Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, which Celan had been reading and which describes a cluster of Jews pressed against the gas chamber door, ‘even in death clawed into each other’. Here and elsewhere, Felstiner shows Celan as a harsh and knowing poet, and any idea of him as advancing Jewish-Christian or Jewish-German reconciliation is not only half-baked but deliberately, even viciously untrue.
In this instance, the reader might perhaps have intuited what was behind Celan’s phrase, but elsewhere Felstiner shows things that are off the charts. At the time of Celan’s third book, Sprachgitter (Speech Grille), he and his wife visited her mother who had retired to a nunnery and spoke to them, literally, through a grille. Near the end of the long poem ‘Engführung’, variously ‘Straitening’ or ‘Stretto’ in translation, is a little stanza: ‘Chöre, damals, die / Psalmen. Ho, ho- / sianna.’ (‘Choirs, back then, the / Psalms. Ho, ho- / sanna.’) It’s not a problem to translate – a lot of Celan isn’t – but it’s numbing to read, without the help of Felstiner: ‘ “Hosanna” shouts welcome and praise, like the glorious Osanna in excelsis in Bach’s B Minor Mass. But in Psalms the Hebrew term means “Save [us] please!” (118:25). “Ho, ho- / sanna” reduces to a stammer or derisive laughter, with echoes of the German marching song “For we are Hitler’s brown-clad host – Huzza, ho-ho!” ’ A late poem called ‘Frankfurt, September’ is about the Book Fair – Freud and Kafka, both published by Fischer, as was Celan, still – but who would know it: ‘The simulate- / jackdaw / breakfasts. // The glottal stop / sings.’ In German, the two ks in ‘Kehlkopfverschlusslaut’ (‘glottal stop’) signal Kafka, as does the jackdaw, ‘kafka’ in Czech. A poem written after Celan’s visit to Jerusalem goes, in its entirety: ‘Ich trink Wein aus zwei Gläsern / und zackere an / der Konigszäsur / wie Jener / am Pindar. // Gott gibt die Stimmgabel ab / als einer der kleinen / Gerechten, // aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut.’ Here, the Wash-burn/Guillemin translation ends: ‘God turns over the tuning-fork / alone of the small / just ones, // from the fate-engine falls / our measure.’ From that the reader gets the usual vaguely and comfortingly doomy feeling, but they’ve got the verb wrong, the ‘alone’ construction wrong, and have approximated the ending. Not only does Felstiner offer a much better translation –
I drink wine from two glasses
and plough away at
the king’s caesura
like that one
at Pindar.
God turns in his tuning-fork
as one among the least
of the Just
the lottery drum spills
our two bits
– he also offers a page of outstanding commentary, relating the poem to Celan’s quandary about whether to remain in France or go and live in Jerusalem (hence the two glasses, the caesura and the tuning-fork, and the inspired ‘two bits’ at the end). Felstiner ends: ‘With God diminished, the lovers’ fate falls to chance. A lottery spills out unser Deut – our “doit”, a coin not worth a farthing, implying Deutsch as well as Deutung (“interpretation” – our “cents” of things?). My “two bits” gets only a little of that’. This is extremely persuasive, but also so enlivening and so much fun it makes the reader want to chance his own arm: what about ‘turning in your tuning-fork’ (die Stimmgabel abgeben) as something you do when you no longer have a voice, or vote (die Stimme abgeben), or even as a version of den Löffel abgeben, to ‘turn in your spoon’, slang for ‘die’?
My only reservation about Felstiner is that he succeeds too well. Being guided by him through Celan is an experience that is nothing like what I have when I read Celan on my own, and must surely boggle the minds of readers who can approach him only through translation. And to me there’s something wrong about that: these things shouldn’t be so utterly distinct. A commentary ought to be an extension or a deepening of a reading, not essentially, the recovery, revelation, or possibly invention of a poem (although I hasten to add that I follow and believe John Felstiner wherever he goes). By the same token, a translation should be able to do more than just slide the words and punctuation across the page, losing practically everything en route and still leaving the reader utterly baffled as most Celan translations inevitably and unapologetically do. Celan provides the terrain – we are talking about his words – but the authority, the creativity, the freedom and the space all belong to the exegetes: they are the ones who are giving him to us. With other poets, these things are shared out in some measure: the poet does more work on himself, the reader can do more, the translator does more. With Celan’s extremely idiosyncratic, compressed, meta-linguistic poetry, there is even a case for saying there is no point in translating him at all. The syllogism which proposes that, since Celan is just as strange in German and to German, he might as well be translated into English or anything else – and he used to do translations himself too – is just nonsense. His words are defined by – they exist in – their relation to German, their separation from German. Even the very lightest translation – just a sort of Englishing-over, one coat with a camel-hair brush – takes him away. And what sort of translating is that anyway? A translator wants, at some point, to make a difference, to be something other than an autopilot. But how can one aspire to ‘make a difference’ with Celan? The temerity! Even Joseph Brodsky’s argument in favour of ‘bad translations’ – they won’t mislead the reader by any qualities of their own, but will leave his intuition to engage with the original – doesn’t work, because all translations of almost anything by Celan are bound to be ‘bad’, and intuition – or, in Michael Hamburger’s phrase, ‘the gesture of the poem as a whole’ – is all we have to go on anyway. The only possible translation, it seems to me, is the kind practised by John Felstiner in the last two lines of ‘Deathfugue’ (elsewhere, too, he speaks movingly about his success in replicating a break between stanzas). I really think an English reader might as well sit down with the original text and a dictionary, and look up every single word.
‘Ganz und gar nicht hermetisch’, Celan famously inscribed a book for Michael Hamburger: ‘absolutely not hermetic’. That insistence – which utterly fails to square with most people’s experience of reading him – finds an explanation in Felstiner: ‘if his poetry was seen as magically sealed off from understanding, that would relieve its readers of responsibility.’ That is in part a serious argument. When Celan read at a Hölderlin celebration shortly before his death, one of the attending academics reported that ‘philologists precisely informed ... on particular obscurities in Hölderlin shook their heads, rejecting the man up there and his word.’ That obscurity is of our choosing, it is we who make it so.[...]...Celan perfected a style of writing that was able to absorb unprecedented quantities of reality: so much so that the poems don’t require to be read so much as reconstituted. ’
Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up). His upbringing reflected the family’s Jewish traditions, but also the deep love of German literature and culture that was often found, especially in Jewish populations, in the Eastern marches of Austria-Hungary (think of the Galician, Joseph Roth). In Celan’s case, this came to him from his mother: German was, in every sense, his mother-tongue. Already as a boy, he loved poetry, first Goethe and Schiller, then Hölderlin, Heine, Trakl, Kafka and in particular Rilke. He spoke German, Hebrew, Romanian and some Yiddish and was obviously an exceptional linguist, later translating poetry from Russian, English, French and Italian. And yet, when he came to write, he had no real alternative to German: ‘Poetry – that is the fateful uniqueness of language,’ he wrote. Only slightly younger Jewish writers like Yehuda Amichai and Dan Pagis – a fellow Bukovinan – emigrated to Israel and wrote their poetry in Hebrew: Celan couldn’t. It is what gives his poetry its desperate distinction. ‘There is nothing in the world,’ Celan said, ‘for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew, and the language of his poems is German.’
In 1938 he went as a student to France – still thinking to study medicine – but he returned home the following year committed to literature and philology. When the war started, Czernowitz was occupied first by Russian troops and then by the Germans and their Romanian allies. The Antschels were put in a ghetto and got out of it, but in the summer of 1942 his parents were picked up and taken to a Nazi labour camp in Transnistria – one of the bleak, almost nonce names of South-Eastern Europe. Celan himself was fortuitously absent. His father died there, after a few months, of typhoid fever, and his mother was murdered – shot in the neck – by the Germans for being unfit to work. ‘These killings, especially that of his mother, were to remain the core experiences of his life,’ writes Pierre Joris in a biographical note. Celan himself did forced labour. When the Russians retook the Bukovina, he went back to Czernowitz. In 1945, having anagrammatised himself to Paul Celan, he was in Bucharest, where an early version of his most celebrated poem, ‘Todesfuge’, came out in a friend’s Romanian translation: it was his first publication. In 1947, he went west to Vienna. The following year, he settled in Paris, where he worked as a translator and taught – German – at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He married the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange in 1952; they had a son, Eric (having lost another in infancy), and lived in Paris and Normandy, Celan teaching and publishing poems. He visited Germany fairly frequently for professional reasons, giving readings and receiving awards, and in 1969 paid a short but intense visit to Israel. In April 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine.
Celan published six substantial volumes of poetry in his lifetime, of which Atemwende (Breathturn) was the fifth; three more appeared posthumously. A selection from these posthumous books, called Last Poems and published by North Point in 1986, was made by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin. Michael Hamburger has published translations from Celan in increasing volume since a 1972 Selected from Penguin; Poems of Paul Celan, containing work from every one of Celan’s nine volumes, is published by Anvil and Persea. All the English editions – except the old Penguin – have parallel texts. All of them too, I think, make some appeal to Celan’s own activity as a translator – Shakespeare’s sonnets, Emily Dickinson, Mandelstam, Blok, Yesenin, Apollinaire, Valéry, Supervielle, Ungaretti – to validate their own efforts. A scholarly edition of Celan, obviously an exceptionally difficult and delicate undertaking, has been underway in Germany for some years. In the meantime he is surely the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons.
John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five dozen poems, the two acceptance speeches of 1958 (the City of Bremen Literature Prize) and 1960 (the Georg Büchner Prize), and the 1959 prose piece ‘Conversation in the Mountains’. When Felstiner ends: ‘From first to last his poems stand’ – a crucial verb in Celan – and follows that with four pages of lines from Celan’s poems, with their dates, from 1938 to 1970, it is like getting a dramatis personae; and when the reader feels, at each line or fragment, a pang of recognition, orientation and emotion, it is a tribute to what Felstiner has achieved in mediating and explicating these urgent and often enigmatic writings.
To anyone raised on Anglo-American biographies of the sort that know everything about their subject and will say anything, Felstiner’s propriety and lack of intrusiveness come as quite a shock. His gentle approach seems to push Celan back into a more dignified past: it is strange to think he died just two years before John Berryman, whose hospitalisations, marriages, alcoholism and so on are all common knowledge – not least because Berryman wrote about them himself. As Hamburger says, Celan ‘had hardly any use for realism of a kind that merely imitates and reproduces, for what Northrop Frye has called “the low mimetic”’. He never wrote anything like Berryman’s ‘I didn’t – I didn’t. Sharp the Spanish blade’ and the corollary is that we aren’t now being told what Celan liked for breakfast. We don’t know with what feelings or even exactly when he went to his death, nor can we picture the scene on 27 June 1942 when his parents were taken away. In part, it is Celan’s difficulty and delicacy that continue to protect him from any intrusiveness. A poem in Breathturn begins, ‘Temple-pincers, eyed by your cheekbone’. Felstiner conjectures it might be about shock therapy. But it’s good not to know, or rather not to be told for sure – and all these dark and heavy biographical facts are left to accrue to the benefit of the poems (and out of range of the trivialisation and inquisition of biography). It is striking, too, how people who knew Celan talk about him in terms that are reminiscent of his own poems. At times, their statements show a mastery of one of his own favourite forms, paradox: his style of reading aloud, with ‘a cold heat’; the poet Henri Michaux’s laconic Möbius-ism ‘we spoke so as not to have to speak’; or Emmanuel Lévinas’s Dickinsonian remark that Celan’s poems testified to his – stunning phrase – ‘Insomnia in the bed of Being’. Clearly, no one is about to write a knock-down-drag-out biography of Paul Celan; in fact Felstiner’s book is the nearest there has yet been to anything of the kind.
Still, it is not biography that is the motor for Poet, Survivor, Jew, but translation. Translation in the service of comprehension, not as its own end (it makes, I think, all the difference in the world). Thus, Felstiner comes to a poem, offers his English version of it, explaining his priorities and choices, rejoicing in his successes and lamenting his failures, the impossibilities and the imponderables, gives the background to the poem – the imagery, the experience behind it, Celan’s reading, inaccessible allusions and bits of word-play – and goes on. In a sense, the translation is the least conspicuous part of the process; it seems to abolish itself, it is just the vector that delivers the poem. I kept thinking what a roundabout way of doing things this was, how much more straightforward and strictly focused if the whole thing had been kept to German, as poem plus elucidation – but actually it works like a charm. (And it does bring in an English readership: Felstiner’s book assumes no German on the reader’s part, while managing to make it continually available – perhaps the single most wonderful thing about what he does.) As he observes in his Introduction, ‘to grow attentive, especially in translating, is to activate these poems.’ Primarily, then, the translating is for Felstiner’s own benefit: it keeps him honest and up to the mark, it leaves him all the time exposed (as Celan said, ‘poetry exposes itself’), and the continual friction between the languages gives him energy and material. It remains a weird undertaking, this parallel action – a phantom operation, a powerplant with dummy fuel rods. In the context of his book, however, it makes sense: his enthusiasm, scholarship and literary sensitivity enrich these rods. It is crucial that we get not just the translations – inadequate, depleted and impossible as they almost invariably are with a poet like Celan, embedded in that ‘fateful uniqueness of language’ – but a sense of the things that need to be added to make them live. And for that, Felstiner deserves enormous credit.
On their own, the translations can indeed look a little odd. One has been done as a Dickinson pastiche. The most famous one, the version of ‘Deathfugue’ that Daniel Weissbort used in his anthology, The Poetry of Survival, where I first saw it, goes, as Weissbort describes it, ‘at certain crucial points, back into German, in an almost sacramental completion of the translational circle’. Fugally and incrementally, Felstiner incorporates the original, so that the last two and a half lines are exactly as Celan wrote them:
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod
ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein achenes Haar Sulamith
(Since they have been translated earlier on in the poem, there can be no possibility of not understanding them.) It is a way of acknowledging – and in a translation! – the untranslatability of Celan. How can the within/without, first/third-person ambivalence of ‘Deutschland’ be rendered by the unfreighted and external ‘Germany’ (with its distinct root of ‘Aleman-’ for ‘Teut-’, all cosy and Western)? What seems at first like a pointless stunt is in fact only doing in a performative way – and only here, in this of all Celan’s poems, ‘the Guernica of postwar European poetry’, Felstiner calls it – what Felstiner does throughout Poet, Survivor, Jew, which is to bring the German within reach of the English reader.
More striking, and more valuable than his translations, are the readings (of the necessary microscopic acuity) to which Felstiner subjects Celan’s poems. One of his odder words for Celan is ‘reliable’ – reminding me of Heaney’s sloes ‘bitter and dependable’, and then in turn of Celan’s almonds – and he uses it only once, but it stays with the reader, so that by the end of a book expounding (Katharine Washburn’s words) ‘small poems, speaking little, saying everything’, reliability has come to seem anything but a minor virtue. It is here that Felstiner’s book becomes incomparably, almost unimaginably – and finally suspiciously, even counter-productively – richer than reading someone’s English versions of the poems, or even the originals unassisted. Take ‘Tenebrae’, a transparently great poem in any language, not ‘hard’ but with a howling, desolating coldness to it: ‘Nah sind wir, Herr, / nahe und greifbar. // Gegriffen schon, Herr, / ineinander verkrallt, als wär / der Leib eines jeden von uns / dein Leib, Herr. // Bete, Herr, / bete zu uns, / wir sind nah.’ This is ferocious, terrifying in its insistence, and not a letter – the ‘e’ in ‘nahe’ – out of place. Michael Hamburger’s version goes:
We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord,
clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Felstiner has it:
Near are we, Lord,
near and graspable.
Grasped already, Lord,
clawed into each other, as if
each of our bodies were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Hamburger’s fifth line is inelegant, and he loses the thudding ds and the gathering movement of ‘at hand’ to ‘handled’; then again, ‘handled’ is really not adequate for ‘gegriffen’, and Felstiner saves a little more of Celan’s terrifying dactylic metre. But where he really scores is in his sourcing of the poem in Scripture and theology, and, still more, of its fourth line, ‘ineinander verkrallt’ to the German translation of The Final Solution by Gerald Reitlinger, which Celan had been reading and which describes a cluster of Jews pressed against the gas chamber door, ‘even in death clawed into each other’. Here and elsewhere, Felstiner shows Celan as a harsh and knowing poet, and any idea of him as advancing Jewish-Christian or Jewish-German reconciliation is not only half-baked but deliberately, even viciously untrue.
In this instance, the reader might perhaps have intuited what was behind Celan’s phrase, but elsewhere Felstiner shows things that are off the charts. At the time of Celan’s third book, Sprachgitter (Speech Grille), he and his wife visited her mother who had retired to a nunnery and spoke to them, literally, through a grille. Near the end of the long poem ‘Engführung’, variously ‘Straitening’ or ‘Stretto’ in translation, is a little stanza: ‘Chöre, damals, die / Psalmen. Ho, ho- / sianna.’ (‘Choirs, back then, the / Psalms. Ho, ho- / sanna.’) It’s not a problem to translate – a lot of Celan isn’t – but it’s numbing to read, without the help of Felstiner: ‘ “Hosanna” shouts welcome and praise, like the glorious Osanna in excelsis in Bach’s B Minor Mass. But in Psalms the Hebrew term means “Save [us] please!” (118:25). “Ho, ho- / sanna” reduces to a stammer or derisive laughter, with echoes of the German marching song “For we are Hitler’s brown-clad host – Huzza, ho-ho!” ’ A late poem called ‘Frankfurt, September’ is about the Book Fair – Freud and Kafka, both published by Fischer, as was Celan, still – but who would know it: ‘The simulate- / jackdaw / breakfasts. // The glottal stop / sings.’ In German, the two ks in ‘Kehlkopfverschlusslaut’ (‘glottal stop’) signal Kafka, as does the jackdaw, ‘kafka’ in Czech. A poem written after Celan’s visit to Jerusalem goes, in its entirety: ‘Ich trink Wein aus zwei Gläsern / und zackere an / der Konigszäsur / wie Jener / am Pindar. // Gott gibt die Stimmgabel ab / als einer der kleinen / Gerechten, // aus der Lostrommel fällt / unser Deut.’ Here, the Wash-burn/Guillemin translation ends: ‘God turns over the tuning-fork / alone of the small / just ones, // from the fate-engine falls / our measure.’ From that the reader gets the usual vaguely and comfortingly doomy feeling, but they’ve got the verb wrong, the ‘alone’ construction wrong, and have approximated the ending. Not only does Felstiner offer a much better translation –
I drink wine from two glasses
and plough away at
the king’s caesura
like that one
at Pindar.
God turns in his tuning-fork
as one among the least
of the Just
the lottery drum spills
our two bits
– he also offers a page of outstanding commentary, relating the poem to Celan’s quandary about whether to remain in France or go and live in Jerusalem (hence the two glasses, the caesura and the tuning-fork, and the inspired ‘two bits’ at the end). Felstiner ends: ‘With God diminished, the lovers’ fate falls to chance. A lottery spills out unser Deut – our “doit”, a coin not worth a farthing, implying Deutsch as well as Deutung (“interpretation” – our “cents” of things?). My “two bits” gets only a little of that’. This is extremely persuasive, but also so enlivening and so much fun it makes the reader want to chance his own arm: what about ‘turning in your tuning-fork’ (die Stimmgabel abgeben) as something you do when you no longer have a voice, or vote (die Stimme abgeben), or even as a version of den Löffel abgeben, to ‘turn in your spoon’, slang for ‘die’?
My only reservation about Felstiner is that he succeeds too well. Being guided by him through Celan is an experience that is nothing like what I have when I read Celan on my own, and must surely boggle the minds of readers who can approach him only through translation. And to me there’s something wrong about that: these things shouldn’t be so utterly distinct. A commentary ought to be an extension or a deepening of a reading, not essentially, the recovery, revelation, or possibly invention of a poem (although I hasten to add that I follow and believe John Felstiner wherever he goes). By the same token, a translation should be able to do more than just slide the words and punctuation across the page, losing practically everything en route and still leaving the reader utterly baffled as most Celan translations inevitably and unapologetically do. Celan provides the terrain – we are talking about his words – but the authority, the creativity, the freedom and the space all belong to the exegetes: they are the ones who are giving him to us. With other poets, these things are shared out in some measure: the poet does more work on himself, the reader can do more, the translator does more. With Celan’s extremely idiosyncratic, compressed, meta-linguistic poetry, there is even a case for saying there is no point in translating him at all. The syllogism which proposes that, since Celan is just as strange in German and to German, he might as well be translated into English or anything else – and he used to do translations himself too – is just nonsense. His words are defined by – they exist in – their relation to German, their separation from German. Even the very lightest translation – just a sort of Englishing-over, one coat with a camel-hair brush – takes him away. And what sort of translating is that anyway? A translator wants, at some point, to make a difference, to be something other than an autopilot. But how can one aspire to ‘make a difference’ with Celan? The temerity! Even Joseph Brodsky’s argument in favour of ‘bad translations’ – they won’t mislead the reader by any qualities of their own, but will leave his intuition to engage with the original – doesn’t work, because all translations of almost anything by Celan are bound to be ‘bad’, and intuition – or, in Michael Hamburger’s phrase, ‘the gesture of the poem as a whole’ – is all we have to go on anyway. The only possible translation, it seems to me, is the kind practised by John Felstiner in the last two lines of ‘Deathfugue’ (elsewhere, too, he speaks movingly about his success in replicating a break between stanzas). I really think an English reader might as well sit down with the original text and a dictionary, and look up every single word.
‘Ganz und gar nicht hermetisch’, Celan famously inscribed a book for Michael Hamburger: ‘absolutely not hermetic’. That insistence – which utterly fails to square with most people’s experience of reading him – finds an explanation in Felstiner: ‘if his poetry was seen as magically sealed off from understanding, that would relieve its readers of responsibility.’ That is in part a serious argument. When Celan read at a Hölderlin celebration shortly before his death, one of the attending academics reported that ‘philologists precisely informed ... on particular obscurities in Hölderlin shook their heads, rejecting the man up there and his word.’ That obscurity is of our choosing, it is we who make it so.[...]...Celan perfected a style of writing that was able to absorb unprecedented quantities of reality: so much so that the poems don’t require to be read so much as reconstituted. ’
July 28, 2019
Only knowing Celan's work in translation places me in an awkward compromise. John Felstiner certainly assists me in my plight with this remarkable biography which explores the poet--so often with what Celan translated and what Celan was reading. The quotidian is largely absent. The mental health of the poet is alluded to but diagnosis is withheld. There is also a vast effort of establishing possible references, sometimes within each line of a poem.
History runs aground on etymology and we are left with testimony, all to often to quote Villon---letting the neck know how much the ass weighs. There is a wonderful quote from Levinas that Celan revealed the "Insomnia in the bed of Being." Celan was quite the reader and that's something which touches my nerdy core. I can't take a further step in solidarity as Celan's life resembles Perec's--whereas I was born in Detroit and then adopted by a couple who divorced a few years later. That isn't the same thing. Celan's parents perished in the Shoah, a short time later he gave a reading at Gruppe 47.
I was perhaps most moved by a description of Celan's meeting with Heidegger and the almost meeting with Beckett. The former appears to have been guarded and the proposed hike cancelled due to the rain. The potential encounter with the Irishman could easily have proved absurd, banal or simply watching cricket on TV.
History runs aground on etymology and we are left with testimony, all to often to quote Villon---letting the neck know how much the ass weighs. There is a wonderful quote from Levinas that Celan revealed the "Insomnia in the bed of Being." Celan was quite the reader and that's something which touches my nerdy core. I can't take a further step in solidarity as Celan's life resembles Perec's--whereas I was born in Detroit and then adopted by a couple who divorced a few years later. That isn't the same thing. Celan's parents perished in the Shoah, a short time later he gave a reading at Gruppe 47.
I was perhaps most moved by a description of Celan's meeting with Heidegger and the almost meeting with Beckett. The former appears to have been guarded and the proposed hike cancelled due to the rain. The potential encounter with the Irishman could easily have proved absurd, banal or simply watching cricket on TV.
July 30, 2008
Celan can be a tough nut to crack. I have great respect for Felstiner as a translator of Celan. He seems to accurately capture Celan's meaning and rhythm. In this book he does an excellent job of describing Celan's life and aesthetics. Celan's work is the best response I know to Adorno's statement that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The book is worth the price for the translation of "Todesfuge" alone, but there is much more of value in it.
May 9, 2024
Sprich auch du
sprich als letzter,
sag deinen Spruch...
This is the perfect literary biography. Sketches and details of Paul Celan's life are included as they relate to his work as a poet and translator. John Felstiner thoroughly engages with Celan's life and work. He shows substantial knowledge of the many languages involved (German, Romanian, Hebrew, Russian, French), considerable knowledge of the histories, texts, and customs that inform the writing, and valuable knowledge of the work of the translator. As readers, we join Felstiner in deeply engaging with language and its power. We become intimately acquainted with Celan's mind, his work, his passions, his anguish.
Of Osip Mandelshtam Celan once wrote, "Mandelshtam means an encounter, an encounter such as one may seldom experience. He was, from quite far away, that which is brotherly..." This is precisely my experience of Celan. A unique encounter that both reflects and shapes my feelings towards language. I feel akin to him. His poetry requires readers, requires response, dialogue. As poetry should be, Celan's poems are "actualized language," and "sketches for existence."
From the closing of his Bremen speech:
sprich als letzter,
sag deinen Spruch...
This is the perfect literary biography. Sketches and details of Paul Celan's life are included as they relate to his work as a poet and translator. John Felstiner thoroughly engages with Celan's life and work. He shows substantial knowledge of the many languages involved (German, Romanian, Hebrew, Russian, French), considerable knowledge of the histories, texts, and customs that inform the writing, and valuable knowledge of the work of the translator. As readers, we join Felstiner in deeply engaging with language and its power. We become intimately acquainted with Celan's mind, his work, his passions, his anguish.
Of Osip Mandelshtam Celan once wrote, "Mandelshtam means an encounter, an encounter such as one may seldom experience. He was, from quite far away, that which is brotherly..." This is precisely my experience of Celan. A unique encounter that both reflects and shapes my feelings towards language. I feel akin to him. His poetry requires readers, requires response, dialogue. As poetry should be, Celan's poems are "actualized language," and "sketches for existence."
From the closing of his Bremen speech:
And I also believe that such lines of thought attend not only my own efforts, but those of other lyric poets in the younger generation. They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless, in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, stricken by and seeking reality.wirklichkeitswund and wirklichkeit suchend--"reality-wounded and reality-seeking."
June 5, 2007
Throughout my Paul Celan obsession, I've read many biographies, but this is by far the best. I would even recommend it to someone who knows nothing about Celan... by the end of the book, you'll be a fan.
March 7, 2022
For folks who love Celan's poetry, this biography is indispensable. It isn't simply a biography, but is filled with illuminating readings of many of Celan's poems that put them in their biographical and historical context. Since Felstiner is (along with Pierre Joris) one of the best translators of Celan into English, these readings include many accounts of how Felstiner has struggled with his translations, explaining the poetic nuances that led him to make the translational choices that he has. Because of this, this volume pairs very well with the extensive notes to be found in Joris's two-volume Collected Poetry, which themselves often explain what led him to make the choices he did, different as they sometimes are from Felstiner's.
Most of all, the poignant, tragic life of Celan is necessary background for understanding his poetry. It wasn't easy to read about Celan's experiences during the Holocaust years, or his ultimately failed struggle to come to terms with them, but I fell in love all over again with his poetry, which has the reputation for being 'difficult' and 'inaccessible', but in actuality pulses with human feeling and human struggle with one of the darkest episodes of human history, with the felt need to speak about the wrenching suffering, regret, anger, and hope that Celan was throughout his life mostly incapable of speaking about in ordinary ways.
Most of all, the poignant, tragic life of Celan is necessary background for understanding his poetry. It wasn't easy to read about Celan's experiences during the Holocaust years, or his ultimately failed struggle to come to terms with them, but I fell in love all over again with his poetry, which has the reputation for being 'difficult' and 'inaccessible', but in actuality pulses with human feeling and human struggle with one of the darkest episodes of human history, with the felt need to speak about the wrenching suffering, regret, anger, and hope that Celan was throughout his life mostly incapable of speaking about in ordinary ways.
December 6, 2008
If anyone wants to romanticize the Holocaust he needs to read this biography. It will paint a horrifying picture of the atrocity and make one NEVER EVER romanticize this horrible act against mankind. Make sure you read and reread "Deathfuge."
January 2, 2024
gracias a anselm kiefer y a encontrarme en el lugar adecuado a la hora adecuada he descubierto la cantidad de flores que veía paul celan
September 1, 2016
Here we have yet another writer from Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina region, which passed from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire to Romania after WWI. He also, like Gregor von Rezzori and others, became part of the diaspora from that region moving to Bucharest and Vienna and, finally, Paris. All the while documenting his life with poems that display his love of language and his complex identity. This biography, by the teacher and translator John Felstiner, provides both biography and a backkground through study of his poetry and the difficulties in translating it. I especially appreciated learning the deep connections between Celan and so many writers and artists who influenced and inspired him. This is a literary biography that honors the poet.
August 27, 2012
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
By John Felstiner
Celan was a Romanian Jew who wrote in German and drowned himself in Paris in 1970. His parents died in the camps in World War II. His poem, "Deathfugue," with its black, insistent rhythms and wicked imagery, is justly famous as the voice of the victims. He has that quality of greatness that changes your sense of what language can do—in his case, in circumstances of appalling difficulty. John Felstiner's excellent biography is full (as good biographies of poets should be but so often aren't) of the poems themselves, both in German and in Felstiner's own excellent English translations. They are not easy poems, but Felstiner makes us see how they work and how they came to be.
By John Felstiner
Celan was a Romanian Jew who wrote in German and drowned himself in Paris in 1970. His parents died in the camps in World War II. His poem, "Deathfugue," with its black, insistent rhythms and wicked imagery, is justly famous as the voice of the victims. He has that quality of greatness that changes your sense of what language can do—in his case, in circumstances of appalling difficulty. John Felstiner's excellent biography is full (as good biographies of poets should be but so often aren't) of the poems themselves, both in German and in Felstiner's own excellent English translations. They are not easy poems, but Felstiner makes us see how they work and how they came to be.
June 23, 2013
Because I am rather pressed for time while researching a bunch of subjects, I only read "in" this book, but there is no question in my mind that it is a thorough and sensitive rendering of the biographical facts as well as the complex poetic processes of Paul Celan. I read it primarily to find out why Celan wrote in German, although he was born in Bukovina (Romania) and spent his adult life in Paris; no mystery: it was his native tongue.
May 7, 2009
Accolades:
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award
Chosen as a best book of 1995 by the Times Literary Supplement
Chosen as a best book of 1995 by the Philadelphia Inquirer
Winner of the 1997 University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin
Personally, I found this book to be incredible.
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award
Chosen as a best book of 1995 by the Times Literary Supplement
Chosen as a best book of 1995 by the Philadelphia Inquirer
Winner of the 1997 University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin
Personally, I found this book to be incredible.
March 16, 2024
"Etter Holocaust kan en ikke skrive dikt" sa en kjent tysk tenker. Men Paul Celan var et offer for jødeutryddelsene i Romania, han mistet som ung de som betydde mest, men slapp unna utryddelsen selv. Kanskje de som stod på kanten av den store utslettelsen selv skal få bestemme om dikt kan skrives?
Å få lesere til å forstå dette uforståelige var hans prosjekt, men diktene hans er vanskelige å trenge helt inn i og lette å misforstå. Av og til er det faktisk bokstaveligheten som kommer i veien for innsikten. Andre ganger er det kulturelle referanser og fjerningen av all hverdagssyntaks som gjør lesingen vanskelig.
Forfatteren av denne biografien er også oversetter av diktene til Celan og lykkes i stor grad med å knytte liv og dikt sammen. Selv om mange dikt, kanskje de fleste, fortsatt virker uforståelige, har boken gitt meg lyst til å lese den norske gjendiktningen av det han skrev.
Å få lesere til å forstå dette uforståelige var hans prosjekt, men diktene hans er vanskelige å trenge helt inn i og lette å misforstå. Av og til er det faktisk bokstaveligheten som kommer i veien for innsikten. Andre ganger er det kulturelle referanser og fjerningen av all hverdagssyntaks som gjør lesingen vanskelig.
Forfatteren av denne biografien er også oversetter av diktene til Celan og lykkes i stor grad med å knytte liv og dikt sammen. Selv om mange dikt, kanskje de fleste, fortsatt virker uforståelige, har boken gitt meg lyst til å lese den norske gjendiktningen av det han skrev.
April 17, 2020
A very good book to accompany any reading of Paul Celan or study of his life. Felstiner's translations ground themselves in Celan's own work of translating–which allowed him to wear, reproduce, and interact with the text he translated. From this starting point of intimacy, Felstiner reads and writes out from the initial text into analysis and the story of Celan's life. This approach seems opposite to the German critics whose inadequate readings read onto Celan's poetry their expectations of metaphor, style, and "poetry after Auschwitz." Felstiner's reading allows Celan and his work to exist in community among the many thinkers (& places, & inheritances as Jewish, German-speaking, Bukovinian, son of his mother) who(/which) influenced him.
Read
July 16, 2021Finally got through this book (again, these many years later) and i find it much better this time.
I think i must have learned a lot more because it made more sense to me. I was still lost in some of the esoterica, but for the most part i felt it was a good evaluation of his poetry and life.
I think i must have learned a lot more because it made more sense to me. I was still lost in some of the esoterica, but for the most part i felt it was a good evaluation of his poetry and life.
November 23, 2007
Much of Paul Celan's later poetry is hermetic, and acknowledge by many to be impossible to truly understand without knowledge of the poet's life. Nonetheless, for a long time English speakers had no biography of this influential modern poet. In PAUL CELAN: Poet, Survivor, Jew author John Felstiner covers the whole course of Celan's all-too-brief life, emphasizing the poet's Jewish identity above others. Besides a simple biography, Felsteiner also discusses a number of Celan's poems, which he himself has translated into English (the book assumes no knowledge of German), and also chronicles Celan's output of translations and his relationship to other (especially Jewish) poets.
For Felstiner, Paul Celan's feelings as a Jew play an important role throughout his poetry, but it seems especially important in the early and late periods over the middle. Celan began his mature career as an orphan whose parents perished in the death camps and who himself served forced labour in wartime Romania. This of course, providing the impetus for not only his famous "Todesfuge", *the* poem on the death camps, but also the imagery of much of his first acknowledged volume. In the last decade of Celan's life, on the other hand, the poet was gripped by paranoia that Germany was not sufficiently acknowledging its sins and that neo-Nazis were plotting against him. This, Celan as representative of a race that has not only suffered before but is still hunted today, Felsteiner sees as an important part of the late works.
If I give this biography only three stars, it is because I wish that there was more information about Celan's life and less exegesis of his poetry. Indeed, Celan's mental distress which sent him more than once to a psychiatric clinic is barely touched upon. Had Felsteiner split this into a more substantial biography and a separate work of criticism, the reader who wants to know about the whole of Celan's life would be better served. Nonetheless, for anyone trying to tackle Celan's poetry in English translation (e.g. Michael Hamburger's collection POEMS OF PAUL CELAN), this may be useful
For Felstiner, Paul Celan's feelings as a Jew play an important role throughout his poetry, but it seems especially important in the early and late periods over the middle. Celan began his mature career as an orphan whose parents perished in the death camps and who himself served forced labour in wartime Romania. This of course, providing the impetus for not only his famous "Todesfuge", *the* poem on the death camps, but also the imagery of much of his first acknowledged volume. In the last decade of Celan's life, on the other hand, the poet was gripped by paranoia that Germany was not sufficiently acknowledging its sins and that neo-Nazis were plotting against him. This, Celan as representative of a race that has not only suffered before but is still hunted today, Felsteiner sees as an important part of the late works.
If I give this biography only three stars, it is because I wish that there was more information about Celan's life and less exegesis of his poetry. Indeed, Celan's mental distress which sent him more than once to a psychiatric clinic is barely touched upon. Had Felsteiner split this into a more substantial biography and a separate work of criticism, the reader who wants to know about the whole of Celan's life would be better served. Nonetheless, for anyone trying to tackle Celan's poetry in English translation (e.g. Michael Hamburger's collection POEMS OF PAUL CELAN), this may be useful
Want to read
May 12, 2011Will make it all the way through this one at some point.
June 9, 2012
I loaned this book to a neighbor and never got it back. Then he moved--which probably means I'll never get it back. Oh, well, I'll buy it again someday. A very good companion to Celan's poetry.
February 9, 2013
Romanticizing the Holocaust is a tough subject to digest. But Celan was successful in this task.
June 5, 2010
This is a thrilling book, also chilling history of survivor's guilt from the Holocaust.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews