PAUL CELAN: POEMS

by Paul Celan ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 23, 1980

A generous, bilingual presentation of work by the Rumanian-born, German-Jewish, holocaust-haunted poet--some of whose verse appeared here (also bilingually) in Speech-Grille and Selected Poems (trans. by Joachim Neugroschel) soon after his 1970 suicide. These are difficult poems, to say the least, haiku-like--with a maximum of charge condensed into a few cogent syllables: ""HOW YOU die out in me:/ down to the last/ worn-out/ knot of breath/ you're there, with a/ splinter of life."" And Celan's work became ever more elliptical as he descended into a region of private intensity, determined, as a German-language poet virtually destroyed by Germans, that his agony would have to be expressed in his own terms--secretive, oblique, metaphorical--rather than in the accessible German of his destroyers. Seldom do the poems confront the European political subject directly. Moral indignation remains implicit. Only rarely--as in ""For a Brother in India""--is there enough circumstantial data to give grounding to the often-disjointed associations: ""The self-transfigured/ guns/ ascend to heaven,/ ten/ bombers yawn,/ a quick-firing flowers,/ certain as peace,/ a handful of rice/ expires as your friend."" Still, in Hamburger's expert, clarifying translations, Celan's tragic, understated outcry does surface vividly--and this fine (though still not complete) edition is an important addition to our growing sense of postwar German literature.

Pub Date: July 23, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Persea

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION