The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisele Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to...

Beth Hawkins focuses on the problematic faith in the works of Kafka, Celan, and Jabs to reevaluate the notions of God and covenant in light of Nietzsche's death of Godhypothesis. the divine-human relation. In Reluctant Theologians, she shows that Kafka, Celan, and Jabs offer as a testament, as three unique instances of Kiddush Ha-Shem (sanctification of the divine name), to a divine source that persists at the same time as it is being continuously reconstituted in the moment of writing. What connects Kafka, Celan, and Jabs to a postmodern philosophy is their shared belief that a specifically...

The peerless translations of this haunted and haunting Holocaust poet, including ten new poems and an illuminating essay by the translator. Paul Celan is one the twentieth century's most essential poets, and twenty-two years after its publication, Poems of Paul Celan continues to be the single truest access for English-speakers to this poet's work. This new edition adds ten more poems and a significant essay, "On Translating Celan" by Michael Hamburger.

Originally presented as a speech to the German Academy for Language and Poetry on the occasion of Celan's acceptance of the Georg Buchner Prize for literature, The Meridian is one of, if not the most important poetological statement of the second half of the twentieth century. Much more than a personal statement or occasional piece, it is a meditation on the state of poetry and art in general and a rigorous attempt to account for what poetry is, can, and must be after the Holocaust. This definitive historico-critical edition, available for the first time in English, presents not...

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by David Young. Cover art by the author's wife, Gisele Celan-Lestrange. "Celan's English language readers, and readers to come, will be deeply grateful for this new translation of his second book. I admire David Young's clear and respectful introduction, generous to his colleagues in Celan translation, and helpful in providing a broad context for this poetry; and I admire, especially, his faithfulness in spirit as he becomes a 'water-diviner' of Celan's work. Young is a subtle, trusting reader of the ways this poet of poets took as he had...

Here are the long overdue translations of Paul Celan's Romanian poems (one poem dated 1947) by a great poet, Nina Cassian: they contain the buds, bloom, and deathly flowering of the obsessions found in all of Celan's work--death, drowning, deportation, love, pride, loneliness, the magic of language. The book also includes important essays by Nina Cassian, on Celan's early life and work, and post-WWII Bucharest and Paris.

Letter from Paul Celan to Nina Cassian, 1947
"Ingrate ...Seeing yourself simultaneously in the double posture of sleeping bird and fountain pen...the foul mouths of...