Poems of Paul Celan

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.