Paul Celan

Bertolt Brecht's life as a dramatist, poet and polemicist has inspired writers from all over the world. This anthology, published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death in August 1956, brings together English translations of poems by German poets who have responded to his remarkable legacy. The poems demonstrate how Brecht's concerns and his unique diction have become a part of the very stuff of modern poetry. This work includes poems by Wolf Biermann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Paul Celan, Peter Huchel and Heinrich Boll. It also includes translations by David Constantine, Ian Fairley, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hofmann and Karen Leeder.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work-his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) stands as one of the greatest post-war European poets. Celan's prose is as thought-provoking as, and less familiar than, his poetry. The writings and aphorisms on poetry and art illuminate the sources of his language.

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.

This collection of the prose work of Paul Celan makes available the writings on poetry and art of perhaps the finest and most studied post war European poet.

Here are the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the day Celan was buried. 'What Paul Celan once said of his mother tongue holds as well for Nelly Sachs: 'Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech'. Sachs put it this way: 'The frightful experiences that brought me to the edge of death and darkness are my tutors. If I couldn't have written, I wouldn't have survived...my metaphors are my wounds'. From the Introduction.

One of the major twentieth-century European poets, Paul Celan wrote poetry of exceptional linguistic brilliance and intensity drawn from his experiences, particularly of the war years and the loss of his parents in the death camps. In his verse he sought to express 'not only what the experience felt like, but also a sense of living, with comprehension, inside the experience'. WINNER OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN TRANSLATION PRIZE

Das Gedicht heute behauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst; es ruft und holt sich, um bestehen zu können, unausgesetzt aus seinem Schon-nicht-mehr in sein Immer-noch zurück. Das Gedicht ist einsam. Es ist einsam und unterwegs. Das Gedicht will zu einem Andern, es braucht dieses Andere, es braucht ein Gegenüber. Es sucht es auf, es spricht sich ihm zu. Paul Celan