Paul Celan / John Felstiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Felstiner, John, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Celan, Paul.

Poets, German--20th century--Biography.

Poets, German.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [1990]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous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."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Loss and the Mother Tongue (1920-43)

2. A Fugue after Auschwitz (1944-45)

3. Song in the Wilderness (1945-48)

4. "German" Author in Exile (194&-53)

5. Saying No To Say Yes (1953-54)

6. Words That Will Not Heal (1954-57)

7. Only Language through Memory (1958)

8. The Other Voice Your Own (1958-59)

9. With and Against the Pain (1952-60)

10. Wrestling with the Angels (1961)

11. Speaking East (1962)

12. Translation Counterpoint (1961-63)

13. Etching and Alchemy (1963-65)

14. Crossing into Hebrew (1965-67)

15. Prophecy out of Exile (1967)

16. An Embabeled Tongue (1968-69)

17. To Name Jerusalem (1969)

18. A Question of Last Things (1970)

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780300157178

0300157177

OCLC:

1023994043