Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. 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 The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.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 voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor 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 fresh 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, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, 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."

The peerless translations of this hauntedand hauntingHolocaust 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.

"Paul Celan is one of the essential poets--not just of the twentieth century, but of all time. Pierre Joris's selections from the remarkable, heart-shattering work provide what is surely the best one-volume introduction to Celan ever published in English."--Paul Auster "No twentieth-century poet pierces the heart of language with such an exquisite blade as Paul Celan. With Pierre Joris & company's translations of key poems, poetics, letters, and exemplary commentary, it is as if we are reading Celan for the last time, once again."--Charles Bernstein, author of With Strings "Joris has dwelled during the better part of his life in Celan's words and silences and, as his brilliant introduction demonstrates, he has journeyed through the work's intricacies like very few others."--Michael Palmer, author of The Promises of Glass "A beautiful--and necessary--book. Celan's charred radiance shines through every page."--Richard Sieburth, translator of Hymns and Fragments

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet. Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan’s reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, "to measure the area of the given and the possible." Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction and extensive commentary. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century. This volume collects Celan’s first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose (NoOnesRose).

A bilingual collection of poetry by the German poet considered by many the major European poet since 1945 features a selection of lyrics, previously unpublished poems, and essays and speeches dealing with his Jewish heritage, alienation from society, and the nature of writing. Reprint.

This book brings together five encounters. They include the date or signature and its singularity; the notion of the trace; structures of futurity and the "to come"; language and questions of translation; such speech acts as testimony and promising; the possibility of the impossible; and the poem as addressed and destined beyond knowledge.

An arresting memoir of the final years and tragic suicide of one of twentieth-century Europe’s greatest poets, published on the centenary of his birth. "Daive's memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death."—The New Yorker "Jean Daive's memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and poetic confrère of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth century."—J.M. Coetzee Paul Celan (1920–1970) is considered one of Europe's greatest post-World-War II poets, known for his astonishing experiments in poetic form, expression, and address. Under the Dome is French poet Jean Daive's haunting memoir of his friendship with Celan, a precise yet elliptical account of their daily meetings, discussions, and walks through Paris, a routine that ended suddenly when Celan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. Daive's grief at the loss of his friend finds expression in Under the Dome, where we are given an intimate insight into Celan's last years, at the height of his poetic powers, and as he approached the moment when he would succumb to the debilitating emotional pain of a Holocaust survivor. In Under the Dome, Jean Daive illuminates Celan's process of thinking about poetry, grappling with questions of where it comes from and what it does: invaluable insights about poetry's relation to history and ethics, and how poems offer pathways into a deeper grasp of our past and present. This new edition of Rosmarie Waldrop’s masterful translation includes an introduction by scholars Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard, which provides critical, historical, and cultural context for Daive’s enigmatic, timeless text. "Under the Dome breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human necessity of poetry."—Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of the Sphinx "The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering of Jean Daive’s prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop, grab on and leave us haunted and speechless."—Mary Ann Caws, author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry "Rosmarie Waldrop's brilliant translation resonates with her profound knowledge of both Celan's and Daive's poetry and the passion for language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful collaboration."—Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On "Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celan’s question to Jean Daive as her own. I cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that contends with time."—Fady Joudah, author of Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance "Daive's writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celan's various enunciations, his linguistic humility. … Celan’s death, what Daive calls 'really unforeseeable,' remains as an 'undercurrent' in the conversations recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of true mourning and acknowledgement."—Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence