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The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990. Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, 'almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.' He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970.This third Anvil edition of Michael Hamburger's selected translations now includes the previously uncollected longer poem "Wolf's Bean", several additional short poems, and the essay "On Translating Celan" in which he discusses the challenges faced over many years in his engagement with Celan's poetry. The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990.Amazon.com Review
George Steiner has declared, "The quality of aloneness inCelan is pitiless." Paul Celan's hermetic, Holocaust-haunted workscall out to us and then resort to difficulty, private language, and--in the late art--splintering and silence. Celan, who committed suicidein 1970, was born in Romania and wrote in a German taut witharchetypes, archaisms, and neologisms, which has both frustrated andinspired fellow poets and translators. MichaelHamburger has been moredaring than most. Laboring on a dual-language selection, he had toresort to biographical clues to unravel entire poems; he bluntlystates that "much of Celan's later poetry can be intuitively grasped,but not rendered in another language, without as much knowledge aspossible of his sources.... What makes them difficult is the terrainitself--a terrain in which milk is black, death is theall-encompassing reality--not the nature of its charting."

The reference is to Celan's most famous work, "Todesfuge" ("DeathFugue"), a poem which grows more harrowing with each reading,particularly the iconic lines "death is a master from Germany his eyesare blue / he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true."Hamburger's translation begins:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there lies one unconfined...

Customer Reviews (8)

A tenderly translated collection of poetry, written from the Void, an invitation into the Void.
A necessary collection of poems.Redemptive for you and me for being so Holocaustally composed.E.g.,
ver
n
_ICH_
tung

Disturbing Beauty- the Poetry of Life through Death
'you were my death
you I could hold
when all fell away from me'

It may be something of romantic notion to consider the life of a poet as relevant as the work itself, or at least to it, but in the case of Paul Celan, it can scarce be avoided. In his work 'Poems of Paul Celan', Michael Hamburger wastes little page space on defining the poet through his own life, but rather allows the translations to stand as testimony to the man himself.

It's certainly important to know who Celan was in order to understand the context of the work - born in Czernovitz, Romania in 1920, Paul Celan was the son of Jewish immigrants living in the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This polyglot of nations each spoke their own language, therefore from an early age Paul was fluent in German, the regional tongue, Romanian, the language of the country and Yiddish, the common language of the Jewish community which he was a part of. He later became fluent in French, Russian and Ukranian - but because it was his first language, German remained his dominant tongue and the language he wrote his poetry in throughout the remainder of his life. This subtle irony would not be lost on him in later years of his life, nor to the literary world at large in the time of his greatest renown.

For the world was not a kind place in eastern Europe during the advent of the second world war, and certainly Romania was no exception. In the summer of 1942, both of his parents were interred in labor camps as the result of Nazi occupation. The whereabouts of Paul on that fateful evening are disputed, but it is certain that he was not present when his parents were arrested. Paul would also find himself a victim of the holocaust, but managed to be liberated after the soviet occupation. Tragically, neither of his parents would survive.

And it is here that the great work of Celan first begins to show itself through 'Todesfuge', translated literally as 'Death March', a reference to the accounts witnessed where fellow prisoners were forced to play music for the others waiting to die in the gas chambers. The piece itself is one of Celan's most memorable efforts, and Hamburgers translation does it more than justice by rendering an ineffable quality interweaving angst and terrible beauty within lines of winterdeath and movement without once distorting the original fugue rhythm and tone.

To be certain Hamburger expends 34-odd pages on delivering an effective historical background as well as more academic elucidations on the defense of islabeling Celan as 'hermetic'. The remaining 300-plus pages are entirely devoted to his exceptional translations of the work itself. An added bonus: the tome is bilingual and presents both the original German version as well as the translation itself.

Celan's poetry is far more than any isolationist melancholia, however deserved, at circumstance - rather, it is the work itself which bears the very aspect of the transcendence of human experience through words that renders it exceptional and of such merit. It is easy enough to wax and wane eloquent on the whys and wherefores, but words are often better left to speak for themselves. So be it.

'Go blind now, today;
eternity also is full of eyes-
in them
drowns what helped images down
the way they came,
in them
fades what took you out of language,
lifted you out with a gesture
which you allowed to happen like
the dance of words made of
autumn and silk and nothingness.'

A poet who moved from direct social relevance to difficulty and paradox
Paul Celan stands as one of the most influential and visible poets of the second half of the 20th-century. The work he produced from World War II to his suicide by drowning in 1970 has been lauded by subsequent poets, taught in German history courses, and set to music by Berio, Birtwistle, and Rihm. The central theme of most of Celan's poetry is the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, as the poet was born in a German-speaking Jewish enclave in Bucovina and there lost his parents and his home, scars which even a successful new life in Paris could never erase. This volume of selected poems with English translations by Michael Hamburger is a fine introduction to his work.

Celan's poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) is one of his earliest mature pieces and the most common introduction to his poetry. It's opening lines "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown / we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink it / we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined" are a powerful depiction of the death camps and fully repudiate Adorno's claim that poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Some critics have claimed that "Todesfuge" was Celan's only great poem and had it not been for that, then we would have never heard of him. That poem was certainly his break into the literary world, but other material in this volume is just as fine. "Einfuehrung" (The Straitening) is something of a rewriting of "Todesfuge" in considerably more desperate language and my favourite of Celan's poems. Here the motifs of the first poem are shattered into pieces ("Grass, written asunder. The stones, white / with the shadows of grass blades ... Ash. / Ash. ash. / Night. / Night-and-night.") which in turn are dissolved into their component atoms (Gales, / Gales, from the beginning of time, / whirl of particles.").

In "Tenebrae" Celan reverses the relationship of God and his people in Judaism and explicitly evokes the violence of the camps: "We are near, Lord, / near and at hand. // Handled already, Lord, / clawed and clawing as though / the body of each of us were your body, Lord." One of Celan's main concerns was how speech might remain meaningful when so much of life had become meaningless after the horrors of the war years. In "With a Variable Key" he writes: "With a variable key / you unlock the house in which / drifts the snow of that left unspoken ... You vary the key, you vary the word / that is free to drift with the flakes. / What snowball will form round the workd / depends on the wind that rebuffs you."

While much of Celan's work is haunting, I cannot make much of his last works. With the last collections he saw published in his lifetime ATEMWENDE (Breathturn) and FADENSONNEN (Threadsuns) his poetry became so hermitic and so obsessed with polysemy (multiple meanings) that it effectively means nothing. Take, for example, the poem "Coagula" which in its entirety reads: "Rosa, your / wound as well. // And the hornlight of your / Romanian buffaloes / instead of stars above / the sandbed, in / the talking, red- / ember-powerful / rifle butt."

Now, some of the linguistic games of these late poems are entertaining, but I cannot sketch them here because I'm assuming readers of this review have no German, and they indeed cannot be preserved in English. Hamburger has attempted to give the poems some intelligibility by basing his translations on our knowledge of Celan's life, but in doing so he collapses the possibilities inherent in the German text.

In reviewing this volume of selected poems, and consequently the poet's entire career, I'm not sure how to rate it overall and therefore have given it three stars. Celan is certainly a poet worth getting acquainted with, but I can't help feeling that he was going astray into irrelevance with the late poems that only the author himself would have understood. If you are a fan of modern European poetry, or interested in the Holocaust and its influence on literature, pick up Hamburger's translations if you cannot read the original German. John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew also makes a good companion for those who might miss the Jewish symbolism found throughout the early poetry.

Classic Collection
This excellent edition of Paul Celan's major poetry (translated excellently by Michael Hamburger) provides the full scope of Celan's considerable genius. Included is the famous 'Death Fugue,' perhaps the most darkly beautiful and profound works of art about the Holocaust yet created. One is left with Celan's transitions; he began immersed in the syle of early 20th century German poets suck as Rilke, and later progressed in Breathturn and Threadsuns to reveal his capacity for highly creative and original linguistic play. The final poems are characterized by a deep morbidity and anguish; they are patently indicative of the poet's distrught spirits. He would later kill himself by drowning.

Celan is now written about intensively by the philosophers Derrida and Lyotard, he is probably as important to them as Holderlin was to Heidegger. The editor has included a poem that Celan did not intend for publication; but you can understand why it was included, as it is a magnificent triumph of expressive sorrow over the loss of his parents during the war. Celan was a very great poet, readers are still trying to catch up with his complexity and deep artistic insight.

Poetry After Auschwitz
Adorno was wrong. There is poetry after Auschwitz, and this is what it looks like. Celan's short poems are compressed visions of horror. He tears at the fabric of language in order to render the torn fabric of reality. Reading Celan, I think of the best paintings by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, an artist who, like Celan, attacks his materials with fire, sometimes even burning gaping holes into his vast canvases. Art after Auschwitz must be prepared to show the damage, the tears in the fabric of what makes us human. Celan--and Kiefer, at his best--points toward a new way to be human. I cannot praise an artist more highly than that. ... Read more

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Winner of the EC's first European Translation Prize 1990 Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, 'almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.' He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970. This book was awarded the EC's first European Translation Prize in 1990. ... Read more

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tr Michael Hamburger, bilingual ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

One of the first modern poets
Modernity is what defines the work of Baudelaire. No elegant poems of love; no countryside-dreaming; no evocation of the Classics nor references to the past. On the contrary: urban life; the alienation brought aboout by capitalism; the angst of poor urban dwellers; alcohol and drugs. Poetry is no more just the search for beauty through words. Now, it is a vehicle for the expression of the individual. Content is more important than form, and therefore Baudelaire gets rid of the constraints imposed by verse, even free verse, and lets his soul spill out in a not lyrical, but dark manner.

Evocative
These prose poems were my first experience with Baudelaire.I didn't know what to expect, but they're pretty good.They are often vague, but even then manage to be evocative.I'll admit I also bought the book to help myFrench along (as it is bilingual), but it's Baudelaire and it's good andsometimes thought-provoking reading.Enivrez-vous!De vin, de poesie, devertu, a votre guise.Enjoy. ... Read more

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RAINER MARIA RILKE: Dance the Orange: Selected Poems

translated by Michael Hamburger and edited by Jeremy Mark Robinson

This new collection includes poems taken from the time of the great German poet's New Poems through the Duino Elegies to the last pieces. These are some of Rainer Maria Rilke's best works; they are intense, compact, lyrical and lucid, by turns erotic, heartfelt and mystical. Hamburger's excellent translations have the German original facing each poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the greatest of all lyrical poets. Rilke is part of that group of European poets and writers which includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetajeva, and friends such as Andre Gide, Lou Andreas-Salome and Paul Valery.

Rilke was an incredibly inventive creator of poetry, who could forge the myriad states and images of love, from the delicate, detailed and subtle, to the passionate, illuminating and ecstatic.

Rilke was adept at inflecting language with blissful tones: while he could describe the many experiences of love, he found it difficult to turn them into realities, to act on his words. For him love could be a transitory, fragile state between two people. 'Why do people who love each other separate before there is any need? Because it is after all so very temporary a thing, to be together and to love one another'. Rilke saw life as a 'continuous flow of vicissitudes', change following change, so that parting was inevitable, and people should become used to it ('at any moment be ready to give each other up, let be and not hold each other back'.

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`From a Diary of Non-Events' captures a year in the life of Michael Hamburger, from December 2000 to November 2001, observing changes in the natural world alongside the preoccupations and ruminations of the poet in and around his home in a Suffolk village. Occasionally intruding upon these `non-events' are the larger concerns of the outside world. Hamburger's skill in synthesising the two strands results in a compelling narrative in which, as in all great sequences, the whole strikes us as more than the sum of its parts. ... Read more

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This new series brings into modern English a reliable translation of a representative portion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work. This edition, selected from over 140 volumes in German, is the new standard in English, and contains poetry, drama, fiction, memoir, criticism, and scientific writing by the man who is probably the most influential writer in the German language. The executive editors of this collection are Victor Lange of Princeton University, Eric Blackall of Cornell University, and Cyrus Hamlin of Yale University.

Princeton University Press is proud to be the distributor of the twelve volumes in hardcover of the originating publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag. In addition, Princeton will issue paperback reprints of these volumes over the next two years, beginning with volumes one through three.

Goethe, the founder of the poetry of experience, created a body of poetry that is unsurpassed in lucidity of speech and imagery and in instinct for melody and rhythm. Nonetheless, many of his poems are relatively unknown to English-speaking audiences, partly because of the difficulties they have posed to translators. This volume contains translations, side by side with the German originals, of Goethe's major poems--all prepared by eminent American and English writers, and all attesting to his poetic genius.

Goethe's most complex and profound work, Faust was the effort of the great poet's entire lifetime. Written over 60 years, it can be read as a document of Goethe's moral and artistic development. Faust is made available to the English reader in a completely new translation that communicates both its poetic variety and its many levels of tone. The language is present-day English, and Goethe's formal and rhythmic variety is reproduced in all its richness.

The reflections on art and literature that Goethe produced throughout his life are the premise and corollary of his work as poet, novelist, and man of science. This volume contains such important essays as "On Gothic Architecture," "On the Laocoon Group," and "Shakespeare: A Tribute." Several works in this collection appear for the first time unabridged and in fresh translations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful edition
Solid translations and, like all the volumes in Princeton's 12-volume Goethe series, the book is attractive with great typography. Much easier on the eyes than the Penguin editions.

This volume is a very accessible wayto read Goethe for the first time, as well as revealing a new layer ofdepth for those who are more familiar with his essays and scientificstudies. ... Read more

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A gorgeous illustrated poetry collection by W. G. Sebald: "An extraordinarily handsome edition of poems by the late great writer" (Confrontation).Unrecounted combines thirty-three of what W. G. Sebald called his "micropoems"—miniatures as unclassifiable as all of his works—with thirty-three exquisitely exact lithographs by one of his oldest friends, the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp.

The lithographs portray, with stunning precision, pairs of eyes—the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald, Sebald's dog Maurice. Brief as haiku, the poems are epiphanic and anti-narrative. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home. The art and poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialogue. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak." 33 black-and-white illustrations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

WG Sebald in the Guise of a Poet
UNRECOUNTED is a collaborative work by the deceased and sorely missed WG Sebald and his life long artist friend Jan Peter Tripp. Together they blocked 33 poems and 33 lithographs on apposing pages that were meant to create a sense of communication. In Sebald's words "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp, the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak."

As a devoted reader of all of Sebald's output I was eagerly looking forward to yet another posthumous document from this astonishingly fine writer.What is in this handsome volume is not really 'poetry' but rather brief haiku-like musings.Not that they aren't lovely, it is just that they are not up to the challenging standards of his novels.Still one is left with a satisfied feeling having read this (sideways printed) book of thoughts.The art of Tripp is stunning - eyes of famous writers and thinkers.In the end, in Sebald's own critical self examination, these works are "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death".As such, they gain more meaning.Grady Harp, September 05

Like an unknown trunk with a stranger's garments in it
My first thought was that Sebald (1944-2001) might have been a great novelist but he wasn't too good as a poet.And my second thought was that the good people at New Directions are really milking his posthumous fame to try to sell this puzzling "keepsake," as they call it, for $22.95, when it is so manifestly inferior to his other books.But luckily I kept the book on top of my desk for awhile and presently found myself returning to it again and again, trying to puzzle out what made it different than other books of poetry I had read.These "micropoems," as the translator calls them, do creep under your skin.

Here's one:

The house

in the night
through the windows
the flickering light of
flames

That's it!As New Directions lays them out, these lines are all centered a la Michael McClure (it's hard to tell if Sebald planned this effect.)By the way the translator (Michael Hamburger) must be British and I wonder what a good US translator could have done with the German of these poems which the editor has supplied as an appendix for our eluctation at the back of the book.They are so short you could copy them all out on your lunch hour, but they gain weight and resonance by their placement next to the lithographs that inspired them-33 portraits by Sebald's best friend Jan-Peter Tripp) of people's eyes.(A lot of the poetry is about questions of seeing, perception, realization, etc)I thought I recognized some of the faces and I was right in one case only.The eyes are mostly those of famous artists (Francis Bacon, rembrandt, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman) and writers (Capote, Borges, Burroughs) and some of the juxtapositions attain a transparency as luminous as ice water.But you don't find out whose eyes they are until the end, so the volume has the aspect of a parlor game to it.By the way, check out page 74.It says those are the eyes of Proust, but they look like Rex Harrison to me!

So you're reading these haiku and puzzling over whose eyes are whose and before you know it, you are swept away into the land of the Unerzahlt for the ride of a lifetime. ... Read more

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Nelly Sachs was the co-winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature. This book, containing nearly half of her verse, is her first to be published in the English language. The book includes in its entirety one of her most important poem sequences, 'Glowing Enigmas, I, II, and III,' written in the 1960's; poems from six other collections: 'In the Habitations of Death,' 'Eclipse of the Stars,' 'And No One Knows How to Go On,' 'Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm,' and 'Death Still Celebrates Life'; and the complete text of 'Eli,' a mystery play of the sufferings of Israel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The impossibility of poetry
This is not something one merely reads for the pleasure or leisure of literature.Where speech and hope became impossible, Nelly Sachs stared with angelic, orphan eyes ("through the black folds of night") into the hopeless abyss of the death chambers and gathered, both tenderly and damningly, words that just as radically confront us today.Her poetry is a poetry of those murdered many who "might have plucked stars from the sky".Yet she dares not speak for them, but for their tragic, inviolable absence. This is literature belonging to a remainder that should not be, words that arise from the impossibility of speech.Poems such as You Onlookers pierce our complacency over the increasing political use of racism and anti-immigration more than any radical leftist tract can, making me at least no longer complacent.For this racism - be it against the Roma in France or boat-people in Australia - shares the same roots and is permitted via the same complacency as that which stood by and allowed Nazism to grasp the imagination of the German nation.
How can one even attempt to review these poems without reducing their force and the space from which they arise to mere literary history, which is to say to a discourse that constrains them and the unthinkable horror of the holocaust to a mere genre or tradition.One must read them and have the courage to be rent by them, for they rend like no poems i have encountered before.They reduce one to tears and make forgetfulness impossible.As the tangible memory of the Holocaust slowly fades with the death of the generation of survivors, perpetrators and onlookers, it is time we returned to Nelly Sachs' poems so we can see with sober senses what we, as humans, are capable of, and what we are culpable for if we remain complacent onlookers to the continuing injustices humans inflict on one another, whether in the name of nationalism or blatant xenophobia, today.

The great pain written about in a delicate and subtle way
Nelly Sachs writes about the most painful subject the losses of the Shoah in a delicate and subtle way. She does not have the kind of complexity or dimension of her co- Nobel Prize winner Agnon, but she has a voice and a language truly her own.
... Read more

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Indispensable study of modern poetry
Michael Hamburger is one of those academic writers you just want to call up and thank.He seems to delight in making complex concepts plain, but without dumbing them down.Anyone who finds twentieth-century poetry "difficult" or irritating or considers it grossly inferior to the lyrical work that came before it should read this book.Hamburger narrates the century-long story of poetry wrestling with itself as it tries to find new ways to make meaning, and confronts (or evades) the political, philosophical and psychological developments of modern life. His observations on the use of "personae" and the problematic distinction between public and private poetry are particularly valuable, as is the breadth of this study which isn't limited to poetry written in English.Unlike so many academics, Hamburger recongnises that plenty of the works influencing a poet's practice were not even written in the same language (think of the French Symbolists' influence - it even got as far as Australia).Hamburger seems to be an ardent modernist, but he doesn't let his enthusiasm blind him to modernism's failings and contradictions - indeed, they're some of things that make it so interesting.His analysis of the work of several canonical modern poets is refreshingly evenhanded.His insightful exploration of Pound and Eliot is superb, particularly the way in which he relates Eliot's poetry to his philosophy and criticism.Those crouched at Eliot's feet might do well to look up for five minutes and read it. ... Read more

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Since 1941 Michael Hamburger has created a distinctive body of work. `Collected Poems 1941-1994' reflects more than half a century's dedication to poetry and a consistent engagement with both the natural and the human world. ... Read more