Paul Celan - Selected Poems (Penguin, 1972)

Paul Celan - Selected Poems (Penguin, 1972).

ISBN: 0140421467 | 108 pages | PDF

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Romania and became one of the foremost German-language poets of the post-World War II era. He was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in Paris in 1970.

Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, with an Introduction by Michael Hamburger, these selected poems are drawn from Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952); Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955); Sprachgitter (1959); Die Niemandsrose (1963); Atemwende (1967); Fadensonnen (1968); Lichtzwang (1970); and Schneepart (1971).

Celan's most famous poem, the early "Todesfuge" ("Fugue of Death"), commemorating the Nazi death camps, is a work of great complexity and extraordinary power, and is included here. In later years his poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, bearing comparison to the music of Anton Webern.