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Paul Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Translated by Pierre Joris – Chicago Review

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If the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan were a compass point, he would be north. He has long represented a kind of absolute of what poetry is capable of, and stands as an exemplary figure for other poets, many of whom have incorporated aspects of his work into their own. In the postwar years until his suicide in 1970, he extended conceptions of what poetry could be and do, drawing radical conclusions as to what it meant to continue the tradition of the German lyric even though he was using the language of those who had murdered his mother and father and attempted to eradicate his people entirely. It is often assumed that this amounted to a dismantling of German, a way of writing it that worked against its natural proclivities and patterns, but in fact it is at least as accurate to say that Celan worked with and in German, revealing expressive seams and veins that had hitherto lain neglected. Around 1960 Paul Celan began making notes for a lecture on the “darkness or obscurity of the poetic

Share this: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Instagram (Opens in new window) Instagram More Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email If the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan were a compass point, he would be north. He has long represented a kind of absolute of what poetry is capable of, and stands as an exemplary figure for other poets, many of whom have incorporated aspects of his work into their own. In the postwar years until his suicide in 1970, he extended conceptions of wha

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