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sloatsj's review against another edition
5.0
Paul Celan stands among the most powerful poets. His poems are distilled and piercing, usually compact yet heavy constructions of well chosen words. Most poetry readers know his story. Born in eastern Europe to Jewish, German-speaking parents, he lost his parents to Nazi criminals, as well as any sense of “home,” I would assume. It’s strangely just that the greatest poet of the holocaust is a native German speaker. S/he just as well could have been Polish or Dutch or Italian or Hungarian. But here we have the victim speaking in the tongue of the perpetrator, the two are united in language. How better to penetrate and reflect?
Celan is most famous for his poem "Todesfuge," which is a masterpiece (“Black milk of daybreak..."). I think John Felstiner, the translator of this volume, does an excellent job of rendering it in English. Before writing this short review, I compared his with some other translations and he scores high. The translation by Jerome Rothenburg on www.poets.org, for example, is too stylized. Where Celan writes “wir trinken sie abends,” Rothenburg writes “we drink you at dusktime.” First, “abends” is simply evening and not “dusktime,” and the “sie” with a small ‘s’ is “it,” not “you.” Later in the poem, Celan does say “wir trinken dich,” or we drink you, but this does not and should not happen at the start of the poem. I don't mind translators taking liberties for the sake of idiom and making the poem comfortable in its new language, but I do take issue with imposing unnatural 'flourish.'
Because Celan uses a lot of German compound words in his poetry, translators often import them as single words into English, where they can look uncomfortable. I think compound words are one of the charms of Celan’s poetry, and that charm can get lost whether the word is preserved as one or split as is more natural in English. Sometimes it works. Fadensonnen is fine as Threadsuns; Atemwende is fine as Breathturn. We do build such words in poetry in English, too, but they stand out more in English than they do in German. I think Felstiner handles them well, though not always.
For me Celan is a poet who has really known despair, not the personal despair of the depressed insurance salesman cured by Xanax but the despair induced by having witnessed and experienced the depravity and inhumanity of mankind. He is shocked at once to silence and to speech. His is the terrible wound that won’t close, that should not close because we need to know it. These are the things you will find in Celan poems: bread, almonds, roses, wine, ash, soil, snow, stones, breath, eyes. He is not a fancy poet, and he is economical with his symbols to great effect.
**
Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:
I sought your eye when you looked out and no one saw you,
I spun the secret thread
where the dew you mused on
slid down to pitchers
tended by a word that reached no one’s heart.
There you first fully entered the name that is yours.
you stepped toward yourself on steady feet,
the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,
things overheard thrust through to you,
what’s dead put its arm around you too,
and the three of you walked through the evening.
Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.
**
I would definitely recommend this volume, which offers a good selection of Celan in clean translations. It is not complete. The book
[b:Mohn und Gedächtnis|2286909|Mohn und Gedächtnis|Paul Celan|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41-x8t3KOBL._SL75_.jpg|2293114] alone, Poppy and Memory in English, for example, has nearly sixty poems. There are only 15 poems from that book in this volume. I always have to remind myself that I speak German fluently and can read the original but I do like to have my native English, too.
Celan is most famous for his poem "Todesfuge," which is a masterpiece (“Black milk of daybreak..."). I think John Felstiner, the translator of this volume, does an excellent job of rendering it in English. Before writing this short review, I compared his with some other translations and he scores high. The translation by Jerome Rothenburg on www.poets.org, for example, is too stylized. Where Celan writes “wir trinken sie abends,” Rothenburg writes “we drink you at dusktime.” First, “abends” is simply evening and not “dusktime,” and the “sie” with a small ‘s’ is “it,” not “you.” Later in the poem, Celan does say “wir trinken dich,” or we drink you, but this does not and should not happen at the start of the poem. I don't mind translators taking liberties for the sake of idiom and making the poem comfortable in its new language, but I do take issue with imposing unnatural 'flourish.'
Because Celan uses a lot of German compound words in his poetry, translators often import them as single words into English, where they can look uncomfortable. I think compound words are one of the charms of Celan’s poetry, and that charm can get lost whether the word is preserved as one or split as is more natural in English. Sometimes it works. Fadensonnen is fine as Threadsuns; Atemwende is fine as Breathturn. We do build such words in poetry in English, too, but they stand out more in English than they do in German. I think Felstiner handles them well, though not always.
For me Celan is a poet who has really known despair, not the personal despair of the depressed insurance salesman cured by Xanax but the despair induced by having witnessed and experienced the depravity and inhumanity of mankind. He is shocked at once to silence and to speech. His is the terrible wound that won’t close, that should not close because we need to know it. These are the things you will find in Celan poems: bread, almonds, roses, wine, ash, soil, snow, stones, breath, eyes. He is not a fancy poet, and he is economical with his symbols to great effect.
**
Count up the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you waking,
count me in too:
I sought your eye when you looked out and no one saw you,
I spun the secret thread
where the dew you mused on
slid down to pitchers
tended by a word that reached no one’s heart.
There you first fully entered the name that is yours.
you stepped toward yourself on steady feet,
the hammers swung free in the belfry of your silence,
things overheard thrust through to you,
what’s dead put its arm around you too,
and the three of you walked through the evening.
Render me bitter.
Number me among the almonds.
**
I would definitely recommend this volume, which offers a good selection of Celan in clean translations. It is not complete. The book
[b:Mohn und Gedächtnis|2286909|Mohn und Gedächtnis|Paul Celan|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41-x8t3KOBL._SL75_.jpg|2293114] alone, Poppy and Memory in English, for example, has nearly sixty poems. There are only 15 poems from that book in this volume. I always have to remind myself that I speak German fluently and can read the original but I do like to have my native English, too.
zebglendower's review against another edition
4.0
I'm certainly glad to have been introduced to Celan's work. There's no other 20th century poet like him. That being said, I rarely found his work moving. It was (I suppose) obscure and fragmented, and intentionally so. He's clearly a master and brilliant, and there are certainly some poems I'll keep with me, but I can't say Celan is now one of my favorite poets. Five stars in recognition of his brilliance, three in recognition of my enjoyment factor--an average of four, then.
enoughgaiety's review against another edition
5.0
For my money, one of the most devastating poets of the mid-late twentieth century.
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