Paul Celan.
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.
W. W. Norton, 2000. First printing. Translation by John Felstiner. 039304999X xxxvi/426 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in black paper spine and dark green paper-covered boards, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book shows very light shelfwear. Dust jacket is like new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the eastern European provice of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at Nazi hands, he wrote "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue," 1945), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, Celan persisted in his German mother tongue for twenty-five years, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance not seen before in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
This rich selection contains more of his own than any previous one, including for the first time Celan's youthful lyrics plus unpublished poems found after his death. Also included are lucid versions of the poet's three major speeches and his whimsical prose fiction, "Conversation in the Mountains." An engraving by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, echoing her husband's texts, is reproduced here, along with hitherto unpublished Celan manuscripts."