Breathturn into Timestead

Starred review from November 17, 2014
Hard to forget and harder to interpret, the dense and astonishing poems of Paul Celan (1920–1970) stand near the center of postwar European letters, and of Jewish writing after the Holocaust. This first appearance in English of the complete late volumes arrives thanks to a poet well suited to the task. Joris, a celebrated and prolific Luxembourger-American writer, has been translating Celan since 1967 and here finds beautiful—or terrifying—correlates for Celan’s wrenched and recombinant speech. Celan, raised amid many languages, spoke German at home. The Nazis killed his parents and held the poet in a labor camp until the end of the war. Celan settled in Paris, but wrote his poems in German. The later poems—six books, three of them posthumous—comprise new compounds, alienated images, hauntingly crystallized phrases that sound like nobody’s native tongue: critics find in them responses to the Holocaust, an “excavated heart,” a civilization beyond repair. To read Joris’s Celan is to see not only the insights and the horrors, but also intimacy, sexual jealousy, irony, even humor and hope. The exemplary en face edition also presents all the German; Joris provides a careful introduction and ample, learned notes.

November 15, 2014
Paul Celan (192070) was a celebrated translator and a poet recognized as one of the twentieth century's greatest writing in German, alongside Rainer Maria Rilke. Celan's work is defined by his experiences during WWII, including segregation into a Romanian ghetto, the deportation and death of his parents, and imprisonment in a Nazi labor camp. While Celan's early work is characterized by lyrically complex and emotionally intense verse, the tone and tenor of his poetry shifted dramatically as he moved away from the immediacy of wartime memories and began to write out of an urgency to reinvent his mother tongue through enigmatic lines and German neologisms. Nearly every page of this comprehensive bilingual edition includes wild, bewildering jewels: Down melancholy's rapids / past the blank woundmirror: There the forty / stripped lifetrees are rafted, and the bloodsugar-pea, x-rayable / by fingernails, / rotates. Such odd, disorienting turns make for page after page of challenging poetry, and master translator Joris' extensive introduction and commentary provide vital context for readers less familiar with Celan's linguistic audacity. A priceless compendium.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)