Snow Part

The last book of Paul Celan, never before translated.

Miriam Tuliao - Library Journal

Born in Czernovitz, Romania, in 1920 to a German Jewish family, Celan is regarded as one of the most significant poets to emerge from post-World War II Europe. To read Celan is to enter a poetic universe that is intellectually challenging and tonally rich. In this bilingual edition, Fairley (Fathomsuns and Benighted: Fadensonnen und Eingedunkelt) translates the 70 poems that make up Celan's Schneepart (posthumously published in 1971), along with 19 others produced during the poet's final years. Celan's parents were killed in a Nazi concentration camp, while he survived nearly two years of internment. His late poems focus on the experience of the Holocaust: "Tanks worm the suburbs." The poems are economic while syntactically and linguistically stylized. Night is "Over-/ridden, Over-/slidden, Over-/swithined//Un-/sung, Un-/swung, Un-/witherwrung." Narrative voices are "battleweary" and "strained," while the world is "frostsealed." Modern poetry readers have reasons to be grateful for Fairley's superb interpretation. Recommended for public and academic libraries.

PAUL CELAN was born Paul Ancel of a Jewish family in Romania in 1920. In 1942 his parents were deported and died in an extermination camp. Celan escaped but was in a labour camp until 1944. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he took up the study of German literature and became a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieur. Paris remained his home until his suicide by drowning in 1970.