Authors: Paul Celan, Rosemarie Waldrop (Translator), Rosemarie Waldrop
ISBN-13: 9780415967235, ISBN-10: 0415967236
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: March 2003
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Paul Celan was born in Bukowina, Romania, in 1920. His parents died at the hands of the German army in 1942. He escaped, survived a period in a labor camp, and eventually settled in Paris where he taught and wrote. He received the Buechner Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award, before he died by suicide in 1970.
A collection of prose by Paul Celan. Included are replies to questionnaires from the Flinker bookstore, an address to the Hebrew Writers' Association, and introductory notes to the translations of works of Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam.
For Celan, the Romanian-born poet who survived a Nazi labor camp and committed suicide in 1970, poetry aspired to silence. His sparse, intense prose pieces, gathered in this small volume, reflect both his mistrust of the medium of language and his use of words ``to orient myself, to find out where I was.'' As a Jew living in postwar Paris, Celan felt a stranger to culture, society, even to nature, a feeling conveyed in the hypnotic, repetitive ``Conversation in the Mountains.'' Deftly translated from the German, the book includes essays, letters, aphorisms, parables, speeches, responses to questionnaires, and introductions to his translations of Russian poets Osip Mandelstam and Alexandercorrect (i've seen variant Aleksander).eed/that's the difficulty with transliterations, many variants.leave as is.gs Blok. ``Racked by reality and in search of it,'' Celan pushes language to the limits of expressiveness in these groping, incantatory pieces. (June)
Introduction | ||
Edgar Jene and the Dream about the Dream | 3 | |
Backlight | 11 | |
Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958 | 15 | |
Conversation in the Mountains | 17 | |
Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1961 | 23 | |
Letter to Hans Bender | 25 | |
Reply to a Poll | 27 | |
La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose | 29 | |
Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen | 33 | |
The Meridian | 37 | |
Address to the Hebrew Writers' Association | 57 | |
App | Introductory Notes to the Translations of Blok and Mandelstam | 61 |
App: Sources | 65 |