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Jewish Poetry, German Poetry
Poems of Paul Celan by Michael Hamburger — book cover

Poems of Paul Celan

by Michael Hamburger (Translator), Paul Celan
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Overview

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.

Author Biography: A Romanian Jew, Paul Celan was born in 1920. He survived the death of both of his parents at the hands of the Nazis and eighteen months in a labor camp before escaping to Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. Celan was never able to overcome his sense of loss and alienation following the Second World War, and he died, a suicide, in 1970. For his Celan translations, Michael Hamburger was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and the prestigious Goethe medal.

Synopsis

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.

Author Biography: A Romanian Jew, Paul Celan was born in 1920. He survived the death of both of his parents at the hands of the Nazis and eighteen months in a labor camp before escaping to Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. Celan was never able to overcome his sense of loss and alienation following the Second World War, and he died, a suicide, in 1970. For his Celan translations, Michael Hamburger was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and the prestigious Goethe medal.

George Steiner

One's gratitude for [Hamburger's] Celan versions...is unstinted. —New Yorker

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Editorials

George Steiner

One's gratitude for [Hamburger's] Celan versions...is unstinted. —New Yorker

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This bilingual edition spans the great and tragic German poet's career from 1920 until his suicide in 1970. In much of the work, ``Celan writes about the Holocaust--though by contrast and allusion--in poems that are dark, sharply felt and authentic . . . economical in the extreme,'' determined PW. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Cryptic. Paradoxical. Difficult. These are words that award-winning translator Hamburger uses to describe Celan's poems. A Romanian Jew who lost his parents in the Holocaust, Celan survived--until committing suicide in 1970--to produce an impressive body of work. Possessed by a terrifying vision, his poems in this expanded and revised bilingual edition of an earlier and now-out-of-print collection nevertheless do not express the terror overtly. But we feel it in the tensions his lines create. Celan does not give us confessional poetry; it is his power to lead us to his private vision, the stuff of all great poetry, that makes his a voice we must learn to hear. Here is an artistry to cherish, and Hamburger is to be applauded for his superb translations of a major poet.-- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.

Book Details

Published
November 1, 2002
Publisher
Persea Books
Pages
416
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780892552757

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