Paul Celan
Poet, Survivor, Jew
John Felstiner(Author)
Yale University Press
Published on 26. April 1995
Book
Hardback
364 pages
978-0-300-06068-3 (ISBN)
Description
Paul Celan was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's book is a critical biography of Celan. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue" - plus his speeches, prose fiction and letters. The book also presents photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labour and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix.
At the same time Felstiner finds insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtram, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."
At the same time Felstiner finds insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtram, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
17 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
650 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-06068-3 (9780300060683)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Preface; PART I STRICKEN: Loss and the Mother Tongue, 1920-43; A Fugue after Auschwitz, 1944-45; Song in the Wilderness, 1945-48; German Author in Exile, 1948-53; Saying No to Say Yes, 1953-54; Words that will not Heal, 1954-57. PART II SEEKING: Only Language Through Memory, 1958; The Other Voice of your Own, 1958-59; With and Against the Pain, 1959-60; Wrestling with the Angels, 1961; Speaking East, 1962; Translation Counterpoint, 1961-63. PART III REALITY: Etching and Alchemy, 1963-65; Crossing into Hebrew, 1965-67; Prophecy out of Exile, 1967; An Embabeled Tongue, 1968-69; To Name Jerusalem, 1969; A Question of Last Things, 1970; Notes; Index.