Poems of Paul Celan

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.’ Language, 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. Michael Hamburger’s extensive selection of Celan’s poems is presented in facing-text form, prefaced by an illuminating introduction. This third Anvil edition of his 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.

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was born Paul Antschel 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 gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in German in 1952. His earliest poems were written in Romanian and have been translated by, among others, his friend Nina Cassian. He was a fine translator of poetry, mainly from French, English, Russian and Romanian. His mysterious meeting with Martin Heidegger was the subject of a radio play by John Banville. Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) was a poet and critic of distinction as well as the outstanding translator of German poetry. His awards include the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (1981), the German Federal Republic’s Goethe Medal (1986) and the EC’s first European Translation Prize (1990) for Poems of Paul Celan. Five collections of his poetry appeared since Collected Poems 1941–1994. He also published several collections of essays, the critical study The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography String of Beginnings. His translations include selections from Celan, Eich, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, Hölderlin, Peter Huchel, Rilke and others.