THREADSUNS

Name: THREADSUNS
Author: Paul Celan
ISBN: 1-55713-294-1

by Paul Celan & translated by Pierre Joris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2000

While we await the critical and fully annotated edition of Celan’s verse, this collection helpfully deepens his mystery.

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Celan is commonly regarded as the most important poet to write in German since Rilke, but many of his poems remain untranslated and very few are known by English readers. Many lines of Celan sound like uncanny echoes of Heiddegger: “Undebecome, everywhere / gather yourself, / stand.” Even the translator admits of the poems that “their readability is still an issue.” And not only because of the complex philosophy they enact, but because many are autobiographical in nature, referencing specific times, places, and people. Footnotes, which all editors and translators of Celan agree are necessary supplements, are sparse here: they are offered “more as a map of our ignorance than as a showcase for our knowledge.” Once the difficulties of the project are acknowledged, any reader of Celan will be happy to have this competent translation (with facing German text) of an important late collection. The comparative lyricism and directness of Celan’s early verse gave way, in the mid-1960s, to the leaner, more obdurate music of his late style. The poems are full of compound nouns (the jawbreaking “verse-fibula-yoke” is a translation of “Versspangen-Joch”), neologisms, and radical disjunctures of prosody. Joris’s valiant efforts to render Celan into readable and adequately inventive English are not as elegant as Michael Hamburger’s (Celan’s most gifted translator), but they do occasionally manage to strike very close to what Celan suggestively calls “the missing target”: “You, too, with all / the instrangedness in you, / instrange yourself, / deeper, / the One / string / tenses its pain below you, / the missing target / radiates, bow.”

While we await the critical and fully annotated edition of Celan’s verse, this collection helpfully deepens his mystery.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2000

ISBN: 1-55713-294-1

Page Count: 280

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GLOTTAL STOP
by Paul Celan & translated by Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh

- BOOK REVIEW
SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN
by Paul Celan & translated by John Felstiner

- BOOK REVIEW
CORRESPONDENCE
by Paul Celan & Nelly Sachs

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.