Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition

by Paul Celan

2015 National Translation Award Winner in Poetry

Paul Celan, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, created an oeuvre that stands as testimony to the horrors of his times and as an attempt to chart a topography for a new, uncontaminated language and world. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris.

This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual . . . ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won."

Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. The work is that of a witness and a visionary.

Genres: Poetry, German Literature, 20th Century, Fiction

736 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 2014

About the author

Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O my Soul, you are so much more beautiful after your Snowstorms!"
Alban Berg, Orchester Lieder.

To read this book is to pop a Jagged Little Pill that chills your innards. I read it during a winter transmogrified by Arctic lows, here in Canada, and what ardent voice it gave to my icy ennui!

It meshed with my own inner arctic trough:

In
the wind trap
the lung
blown empty
flowers. A
handful
sleepcorn
drifts from the mouth
stammered true
out toward the
snow-
conversations.

But had I known then that the Spring would curse the world with COVID, I might then have counted myself blessed!
***
Paul Celan lived his brief lyrical life in the gloomy valley of the shadow of his own death. As Auden said so well, a crack in his teacup would "open a lane to the land of the Dead" in his heart.

And, like Keats, he was "half in love with death," in his obsession. Indeed, at the end, in 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine.

the
Lord of this
hour
was
a wintercrea -
ture, for his
sake
happened what
happened -

One biographer notes that he was wracked with guilt over his parents' death in the Nazi Romanian camps. Seems he was unable to relocate them to safety in time.

But he himself was to be interned in the camps, up to the Soviet occupation when he was fortunately freed.

Escaping to Paris, his depression became worse - so he wrote endlessly - in German, his native language. If Georg Trakl had an heir, Paul Celan was that man.

For no one knew the geography of death better.

today
already:
eternity too is
full of eyes -

Terse and intensely problematic, these brief lyrics perch combatively on the sharp edges of interior icestorms.

You can sense his continual failure to wrench some sense out of his wartime trauma through the oblique intent of his breathless imagery.

How many of his hopeless efforts must have been trashed!
***
Life's meaning, surely, is in the living: but for Celan, in Eliot's dark words:

Time and the bell
(Had) buried the day -
The black cloud (had)
Carried the sun away.

The Enemy had dammed up the lyrical flow of his life into sheer stagnant horror.

But for us who remain in the struggle, this gorgeously rendered translation remains a lapidary testament to Man's undying Search for Meaning -

And the jagged will to persevere in it for as long as humanly possible!

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Infinity Literature like Finnegans Wake. So one never really finishes or begins reading it. I certainly didn't. End or begin. The kind of writing that if you don't read it and revisit it your entire life it will never yield up its secrets. Probably won't then either. But, even in translation, Celan does things with language that are unprecedented, unable to anticipate, and, for me at least, mostly unable to decipher. I'd say approach it as you would approach music, but one doesn't do that with words. So approach Celan as you would approach the spirit of beauty that dissolves when you try to apprehend her. Try to hold him. You'll fail.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a review of Celan's poetry, which I will simply say is, I think, among the greatest of the 20thc, but of this edition.

It is a beautifully made hardback from FSG - german text of the poems on the left, english translations on the right (this is essential for Celan's work - not to have the bilingual even if you don't read German (I don't) is to miss out on much - it is important to see the shape, the breaks in words, the sounds etc)

Joris' translations are, in general, not as traditionally "poetic" in English as Hamburger's - they do not have the same flow or use as many traditional poetic devices etc - but are, because of this, more "accurate".

Short comparison -

Original:

FADENSONNEN
über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.
Ein baum-
hoher Gedanke
greift sich den Lichtton: es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
der Menschen.


Joris :

Threadsuns
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree —
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind

Hamburger:

Thread suns
above the grey-black wilderness.
A tree-
high thought
tunes in to light's pitch: there are
still songs to be sung on the other side
of mankind.


Felstiner

Threadsuns
over the grayblack wasteness.
A tree –
high thought
strikes the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
humankind.



What is interesting here about the act of translation (and why reading a number of different versions of Celan's work is helpful) can be seen from the different ways that "greift sich den Lichtton" is translated. Google translate gives me "grabs the optical sound" ....

I think "light-tone" is better than Hamburger's "pitch" - not least because it retains more of the sound of the original german.

"greift" itself gets me these meanings:

http://en.dicios.com/deen/greift

There is no "strikes" here (though I think the sound of this works better in english) - "strikes" and "light" bounce nicely off each other - Joris' choice certainly seems closer to the original german - what do any of you german speakers out there think? To stike something and to grab something are very different activities!

So why not "grips"? Then we would retain both the "G" and the "i" (and note how there is an "i" in every main word in the line in the original) - perhaps because "grips" is too forceful, too aggressive? "Grasp" both suggests a certain desperation, but also "to grasp" something is to understand it - is this meaning there in the German?

Anyway, I marked this as "read" though I will be reading and re-reading for the rest of my life, I am sure, simply to put it on more people's radars...

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

([…] Where flames a word, would testify for us both?
You—all, all real. I—all delusion.)
*
In the noises, like our beginning,
in the ravine,
where you fell to me,
I wind it up again, the
musical box—you know: the invisible,
the
inaudible one.
*
[…] you,
with the hope
fogging you in.
*

the wilding conviction
that this is to be said differently than
so.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celan seems to have signaled as far back as 1958 that a change in his poetics was taking place, when he suggested that for him poetry was no longer a matter of "transfiguring" (verklären). The statement came in a short text written as a reply to a questionnaire from the Librairie Flinker in Paris, and needs quoting more fully, as it shows Celan already thinking through changes that will be implemented only in the poetry of the sixties, and which the volume Sprachgitter | Speechgrille, to be published the following year, foreshadows without fully developing. Given "the sinister events in its memory," writes Celan, the language of German poetry has to become "more sober, more factual . . . 'grayer.'" This greater factuality checks a core impulse of the lyrical tradition - in German the common word for poetry is Lyrik - and its relation to the lyre, to music: "it is . . . a language which wants to locate even its 'musicality' in such a way that it has nothing in common with the "euphony" is to increase the accuracy of the language: "it does not transfigure or render 'poetrical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible."
Celan underscores this turning point, this Wende, when he uses the word in the title of the volume that incarnates the turn and opens the book underhand: Atemwende | Breathturn...
- Introduction, pg. xli-xlii

Breathturn into Timestead collects the five volumes of poetry that followed the "turn" in Celan's poetics: Breathturn , Threadsuns , and Lightduress , published in Celan's lifetime, along with Snow Part and Timestead , published posthumously (following Celan's suicide in 1970).

In addition, Breathturn into Timestead includes a cycle entitled "Tenebrae'd". According to the commentary by translator/editor Pierre Joris, the poems of this cycle were "written during the time of the composition of Threadsuns , and originally conceived as part of that volume"...

In January 1968, Celan sent the cycle with the added title Eingedunkelt to Siegfried Unseld, the publisher of Suhrkamp Verlag, who had asked for a contribution to an anthology to be called Aus aufgegebenen Werken (From Abandoned Works).
- Commentary, pg. 543

Breathturn ...

The numbers, in league
with the images' doom
and counter-
doom.

The clapped-on
skull, at whose
sleepless temple a will-
of-the-wisping hammer
celebrates all that in
worldbeat.

*

To stand, in the shadow
of the stigma in the air.

Standing-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all that has room in it,
even without
language.

*

Hollow lifehomestead. In the windtrap
the long
blown empty
flowers. A handful
sleepcorn
drifts from the mouth
stammered true
out towards the snow-
conversations.

*

Tell your fingers
accompanying you far in-
side the crevasses, how
I knew you, how far
I pushed you into the deep,
where my most bitter dream
slept with you heart-fro, in the bed
of my inextinguishable name.

*

When they impale
the last shadow,
you burn the vowing hand free.

*

Half-death,
suckled on our life,
lay ash-image-true around us -

we too
kept on drinking, soul-crossed, two swords,
stitched on heavenstones, born of wordblood,
in the nightbed,

larger and larger
we grew, intergrafted, there was
no name left for
what urged us on (one of thirty-
-and-how-many
was my living shadow,
who climbed up the delusion-stairs to you?)

a tower,
the half-one built into the Whither,
a Hradčany
all of goldmaker's No,
bone-Hebrew,
ground to sperm,
ran through the hourglass,
through which we swam, two dreams now, tolling
against time, on the squares.

*

You, the hair taken from
the lip with the bright-
seeing highsleep:
threaded through the goldeye
of the sun-alright ash-
needle.

You, the knot torn out
of the throat with
the One Light:
run through by needle and hair,
underway, underway.

Your reversals, incessantly, round
the seven-
fingered kisshand behind
happiness.

Threadsuns ...

Sleepmorsels, wedges
driven into the nowhere:
we remain equal to ourselves,
the turned-
about roundstar
agrees with us.

*

Eternities, died
over and above you,
a letter touches
your still un-
wounded fingers,
the shining forehead
vaults hither
and beds itself in
odors, noises.

*

Throw the solar year, to which you cling,
over the heart railings
and row to, starve yourself away, copulating:

two germ cells, two metazoons,
that's what you were,

the inanimate, the homeland,
now requests return - :

later, who knows,
one of you two, transformed,
may reemerge,
a slipper animalcule,
ciliated,
in the shield.

*

Dysposition, I know
your knives swarming like
minnows,

closer to the wind than I
nobody sailed,

nobody more than I
was cut by the hail squall
to the seaclear knived
brain.

Tenebrae'd...

Tenebrae'd
the keypower.
The tusk rules,
up from the chalktrace,
against the world-
second.

Lightduress ...

We already lay
deep in the underbrush, when you
finally crept along.
But we could not
darken over toward you:
there reigned
lightduress.

*

Where I forgot myself in you,
you became throught,

something
rushes through us both:
the world's first
of the last
wings,

the hide
spreads over my
storm-riddled
mouth,

you
come not
to
you.

*

Your face shies quietly,
when all at once
lamplike it lights up
inside me, at that place
where one most painfully says Never.

*

Addressable
was the one-
winged soaring blackbird,
above the firewall, behind
Paris, up there,
in the
poem.

*

Delusionstalker eyes: in you
end up the rest of the gazes.

A single
flood
swills up.

Soon you brighten
the rock to death, on which they

have
bet, against
themselves.

*

Do not work ahead,
do not send out,
stand
inward:

transgrounded by the void,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fugued, according to
Writ's pre-Script,
Not overtakable,

I take you in,
instead of any
rest.

Snow Part ...

Lilac air with yellow windowstains,

Orion's belt above the Anhalter ruin,

flamehour, nothing
intercurrent yet,

from
standing bar to
snow bar.

*

Snowpart, arched, to the last,
in the updraft, before
the forever dewindowed
huts:

flatdreams skip
over the
chambered ice;

to carve out
the wordshadows, to stack them
around the cramp
in the crater.

*

Be sloppy, Pain,
don't slap her face
you yourself botch
the sand boil in
the white Beside.

*

Something like night, sharper-
tongued than
yesterday, than tomorrow;

something like her
fishmouthed greeting
over the sorrow-
bar;

something blown together
in children's fists;

something of my
and of no substance.

*

The in-ear device sprouts a bloom,
you are its year, you are dis-
cussed by the tongueless world,
one in six
knows this.

*

A lead, treeless,
for Bertolt Brecht:

What times are these
when a conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes so much
that's already been said.

Timestead ...

Spiteful moons
sprawl and slobber
behind Nothingness,

com-
petent hope, the half of it,
switches itself off,

bluelight now, bluetight,
in bags,

misery, flambéed
in hard troughs,

a throwstone-game
saves the forehead,

you roll the altars
timeinward.

*

Only when I touch
you as shadow
do you believe me my
mouth,

that one clambers
with late-
meanings up there
in the timehalos,
you happen upon the host
of secondusers among
the angels,

the mutefurious
stars.

*

The trumpet's part
deep in the glowing
Empty-text,
at torch's level,
in the timehole:

listen your way in
with the mouth.

[Johan Thilander]

Två uppmaningar gav mig min ingång till Celans förtätade bildspråk. Den första var från Gabriel Itkes-Sznaps förord:

[en bild är] Någonting som insisterar på att verkligheten, den förflutna och framtida, är unik och så ögonblicklig, att den finns och uppstår i ett nu så starkt, så tyranniskt, att man inte kan annat än att låta sig övermannas.

Den andra uppmaningen kom från litteraturkritikern Björn Kohlströms blogg: Paul Celan ska läsas snabbt!

Båda dessa uppmaningar varnar för en allegorisk läsning - i en sådan

drunknar det som hjälpte iväg bilderna
över den väg som de kom,
i den
slocknar det som också tog dig
ur språket med en gest

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

SACKCLOTH-MOLD, tower-high.

Eye slot
for the destarred
at the end of the grief-fibril.

The eyelash-seam, at a slant
to the god-blazes.

In the mouthbay the place
for the rowing
Kaisertwitter.

The. And the Going-with-
him across smokeblue,
blank
tableland, you.

[Joris, 121]


c.f.


SACKCLOTH COWL, uptowered.

Eyeslits
for the unstarred
at the end of the gramfibril.

Lashes stitched askant
the godly fires.

In the bay of the mouth,
berth for the feathering
kaiserchelp.

Yes. And its way-mate
over the smokeblue
empty
tableland, you.

[Fairley, 46]

[Hind · Rating 5 out of 5]

"BEFORE YOUR LATE FACE,
a loner
wandering between
nights that change me too,
something came to stand,
which was with us once already, un-
touched by thoughts."

In all honesty, my soul has been prostrated beyond belief and I still cannot encapsulate this weariness and agony looming over me in words, and I fairly think I'm even more fatigued than I've ever been and that will just amplify as the days tread ahead so my demise takes me to the void of nothingness.

"IN THE VOID
where the chitlins wind
around the brains-
blossom,
I threw myself toward stones,
they caught me
and crowned a round
with what I became."

I have been haunted by demons of grevious losses, the recent death of my brother and the beginning of me encasing myself in the most bewildering stages of my life at the nonce; the demons of lost loves and the premature death of any one that I feel forming. It's exhausting. It's aching how I constantly yearn and all my hands can reach is emptiness; knowing that all I can offer with my distant hands is wilted flowers and feeble words.
Death and loss are recurrent themes in my life and it has been terribly wearing me out.

I, the murderer of my words, the slayer of my dreams had a shield for ephemeral moments when I read Celan's collection because I've thrown all my agonising dismay at him as I read his work. I threw all the heft on his words, all the tears in his works and he took everything like no one has ever done.

With Celan I lamented. With his poetry, I only lamented and rued all my shortcomings, all my flaws and all the circumstances crashing over me because I chose, over and over, to stand against the tumultuous current of what they dictate, and what is pity is that I've only been a rebel against myself all the time.
With Celan I looked for another lost part of me; another bit of the voice I'm seeking; another tear I had to shed, a sigh I had to heave out of my being.
With Celan as well, everything became personal and I often sobbed at how this one sided dialogue set my chest and insides afire and unhurriedly watched me smoulder and crackle, charcoalising everything around me before turning into bitter-salty ash.

Celan, I quote you to yourself as a
diminutive letter from a future twenty-something weary soul:
YOU WERE my death:
you I could hold on to,
while all fell from me.

Because all did fall from me, and I only had my tears and the last pages of your poetry.

Breathturn into Timestead simply and beautifully penetrated me, but perhaps that's another baby-step into the constant eradication of myself before emerging again, and hopefully not losing myself completely.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

TODAY:

nightthings, again, fire whipped.
Glowing
naked-plants-dance.

(Yesterday:
above the rowing names
floated faithfulness;
chalk went around writing;
open it laid and greeted:
the turned-to-water book.)

The owl-pebble raffled—
from the sleep-cornice
he looks down
upon the five-eye, to whom you devolved.

Otherwise?
Half- and quarter-
allies on
the side of the beaten. Riches of
lost-soured
language.

When they impale
the last shadow,
you burn the vowing hand free.

*

[dipandjelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOW DO YOU WORDS???????????????????????

[Cellophane Renaissance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep
in the
honeycomb-ice
waits, a breathcrystal,


at the snowplace.

what does it know?
Deepinsnow,


BRIGHTNESSHUNGER



Icesorrowpen—,



in
the shadow of snowlashes,


and I drove the goldnails into our
coffin-beautiful morning



salthorizons
were building on our glances, a mountain grew
far outward into the ravine,
where my world summoned
yours, forever.



soul-crossed,




from it
comes my hand to grab you
forever.
A little doom, as big
as the heartdot I set
behind your my name
stammering eye,
is helpful to me.
                              You also come,
as if over meadows,


where you break up heaven, again and again,


a new brain blooms for you.



An icethorn

gathers the tones.


an
endless shoelace



I dug myself into you and into you.)



aimblue,



who
is invisible enough
to see you?




the tablecloth
inherited napkins—



VI

ONCE,
I did hear him,
he did wash the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and unending,
annihilated,
I’ed.
Light was. Salvation.



heartstem



so that the wave, honey-
distant, milk-
close,


we remain equal to ourselves,



icetrue,



HEAVENED


a snakebite before
rose-
rise.



the
hammershine hurries.




YOU WERE my death:
you I could hold on to,
while all fell from me.




ground down
to arrowthin
souls,



the Lord broke the bread,
the bread broke the Lord.


the rolling around remainder-
soul,


A halfpleasure.



dewfresh
darkness.


you survive yourself



heartstab




treeward



Snowpart



LILAC AIR



Untilled





IT STOOD
on your lip: the figsplinter

it stood
around us: Jerusalem

it stood
above the Daneship:
the bright pinescent, we thanked it,

I stood
in you.




starheap Blue,

[Sajid · Rating 5 out of 5]

“SOULBLIND, behind the ashes,
in the holy-meaningless word,
the disrhymed comes walking,
his cerebral mantle draped lightly over the shoulders,
the ear canal irradiated
with reticulated vowels,
he deconstructs the visual purple,
reconstructs it.”

Paul Celan was a master at furnishing words. He used to be a carpenter of words,syntaxes. His poems gather together bunches of words to give them meaning which keeps shifting hither and tither,then those words and the whole poem burst out into a disastrous storm. And how beautiful that storm is! His statuere as poet is sometimes incomparable, only Mallarme can be compared to the genius of Paul Celan.

“YOU WITH THE
in the darkglass gazed at,
you One
with the beheld
substanceless light-mirror-surface innermost:
through the ten-
towered desert gate your
messenger-self steps before you, stands,
for the length of a trivowel,
in the high
redness,
as if the people in the distances
were once again gathered around you.”

“OUT OF ANGEL-MATTER, on the day
of the ensouling, phallically
united in the One
—He, the Enlivening-Just, slept you toward me,
sister—, upward
streaming through the channels, up
into the rootcrown:
parted
she hoists us up, equal-eternal,
with standing brain, a bolt of lightning
sews our skulls aright, the pans
and all
the still-to-be-dissemened bones:
strewn from the East, to be harvested in the West: equal-eternal—,
where this script burns, after the
threequarter-death, before
the rolling around remainder-
soul, which
writhes in crownfear,
since ur-ever.”

Describing Paul celan himself as the undisputed source of poetry, he was one of those powerful deconstructionists of the poetic medium. Language can be meaning of course,but language always already transcends the binary of meaning and non-meaning. There is pure language in and for itself. A language of Paul Celan.

[Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest corpus of poetry produced in the 20th century (or any for that matter)? Probably.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian Fairley’s translation of Celan’s Snowpart is not as good as Pierre Joris�� translation of this and Celan’s other late books in Breathturn into Timestead. Joris’ are more literal, so far as that is possible. Celan is not here trying to sound lyrical or poignant or conversational – no, “greyer.” His poems open insights into the depths of social reality, its processes and how they wrench and/or bounce-off humans’ personhoods. Even these distanced- (removed)-seeming poems locate their persuasive and polemical element mainly in the place where depictions of reality are polemical when there is objectively something wrong in reality. It is in this way (in truth-telling) that Celan’s poems are very subversive, (without wanting to delineate an agenda.) Life even in the context of the Holocaust is nightmarish and looks to its sometime-concrete fundamentals (“eye”, “stone”, “dig”, “stand”, and others) to see how it can exist at all – as if life is an experiment in staring. The poems turn up inner workings of the individual human’s relationship or non-relationship to late-capitalist society, and the living human’s relationship to the dead, whose absence and once-presence are or have to seem to be of infinite weight. The poems seem to be wars and other militant and trying-not-to-be-[all-annihilatingly]-militant conflict-trajectories among eternal (though eternally alone, possibly) pieces of or institutions in human perception. The poems are the near side of conversation that takes place in a shocked, tired eternity.
These are poems that pass judgment on, sardonically, their own topics – poems that belittle or negate themselves, partly to depict the negating of people in the world, partly, in words, to negate the human negaters. They are poems not exactly hostile – beyond hostility – but they have enemies. It is as if often the enemies (especially fascists) are not let into the poem, whose space is cleared for and reserved for the dead and their long orientations toward the possible and perhaps even relevant existence of God. It’s a poetry of what is left, and the uncertain demarcations of it, not in its future but in holding-places of unseen shape and size, a paralysis and/or wavering; or like the tension of being confined to a geometric plane, one dimension too few, so that all movement amounts to no more than a kind of wavering (a limbo – a space very loosely and palely grasped by, nevertheless, (for all that has ever been known), invincible boundaries.)
But on a deep level these poems reach out and connect beautifully and viscerally – so that they are twofold – they present a cold and critical face to who is cruel and inhuman, and a human reaching toward (often) the dead and also many among the living. These poems are social in the sense that a declaration of solidarity with the dead is meaningful among the living. The poems take place as if half-eternally (because Celan scavenges in chthonic and ethereal recesses and steppes for the possibility of speaking), but they are crystallizations of woundings and partial healings that happen in this world.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the March/April 2015 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

See the full list of the March Nota Benes here: http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.”

[Ben Houge · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing deep dive into an artist's themes, process, inspirations, and context. The commentary provided by Pierre Joris is astounding, highlighting links between terms in poems and "reading traces" in underlined passages in books in Celan's library or terms in newspaper articles from the time of a poem's composition. These traces illuminate a restless intellect whose interests roved through literature, history, science, anatomy, botany, and several languages. I can't imagine the difficulties of trying to translate these poems replete with neologisms, archaic and technical terminology, and allusions in multiple languages, but especially for a non-native speaker attempting to approach the German, this bilingual edition offers an ideal balance between the literal sense and the poetic gestalt. These are dense and challenging works, but worth digging in and returning to.

To anyone interested I also commend Joris's lecture at Harvard from a few years back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6FlW...

[Peyton · Rating 5 out of 5]

marking this as read for cataloging purposes, but I'll definitely return to it once I can get a physical copy. this book consists of a dense introduction, many poems translated into English, the same poems in the original German, and extensive commentary (which actually comprises most of the book.) as I was reading the ebook on my laptop, I couldn't really go back and forth between the poems and the commentary, so I'm saving the commentary for later! but the poems are stunning even though I don't understand them usually

[Shervin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd say for the first two hundred pages, there was hardly a single poem I liked or could even comprehend someone else liking. It felt like people staring at a Rothko wondering how it's worth millions, except I kind of like Rothko.

But the second half includes work that feels more like something I could understand as poetry. There were even some poems I liked.

Celan's propensity to combine words or change nouns to verbs doesn't always work (at least in translation) but "almonding" was particularly beautiful to me.

[Cooch]

Better perhaps in German?

Worth reading, because every so often, phrases and lines of genius, glimmer through the translation. This is the case with Timestead, in particular. These poems, where the wordplay in German plays such a crucial part in their effectiveness are perhaps almost untranslatable. Don't despair, there are much better translations of the more amenable earlier work available.

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a TOME. I didn't finish this, but I dipped in and out over the course of weeks. I'm going to buy myself a copy so I can dip in and out forever. So many little portmanteaus stuck in my brain like burrs on a sweater. Mutefurious stars, soulbearded, heavensfallow, glimmerhackneys, the bright hunger candle in my mouth... Beautiful, confusing, it takes me out of myself and sends me into orbit

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"(I know you, you are the deeply bowed,/ I, the transpierced, am subject to you./ Where flames a word, would testify for us both?/ You - all, all real. I - all delusion.)" A painful and beautiful second half of Celan's poetic oeuvre.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Little night: when you
take me in, take me in,
take me up,
three woe-inches above
the ground:

all the sand-made dyingcoats,
all the helpnots
everything, that still
laughs
with the tongue -

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every poem in this book informed me of an entirely new purpose for language.

[j.e.rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Give me, death, / my pride."

[Dawson Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

seek reality and win

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Paul Celan is daunting in his earlier poems but his later work was too impenetrable for my taste. Also, I always prefer a bilingual edition for translated poetry. If I can’t at least try to sound out the original, I feel too far removed from the poets voice.

[Mary Sayler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn't easy, but then well-written poetry seldom is!

In addition to posting a review on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/review/RPHCNHQN... I reviewed the book on my Poetry Editor & Poetry blog - http://thepoetryeditor.blogspot.com/2..., which says in part: Not only was Celan ahead of times in compressing and reducing the elements of a poem as poets often do today, his work presents the essence, the essentials, the core of life, the crux of being stripped of superfluities and the superficial.

That was a mouthful! But Celan’s poems, amazingly rendered by Joris, give us beauty and a breathturn into brevity. For example:

YOU MAY confidently
serve me snow:
as often as shoulder to shoulder
with the mulberry tree I strode through summer,
its youngest leaf
shrieked.

I have no idea what that means! Nevertheless, impressions and images arise, recreating a mood and interesting experience.

[Lukas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Min recension: https://www.dalademokraten.se/artikel...

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon further consideration, I'm not sure I love Joris's translations of Celan-- something seems off or missing, or too elemental and unrooted. And this edition is simply packed: the poems have no space for breath. Or perhaps I've begun to turn against Celan, the poet I've always loved most?