Poetry Books
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale Nota Bene)
RRP: $19.00
Our Price: $19.00
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Author: John Felstiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $19.00
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Author: John Felstiner
Publisher: Yale University Press
Average Customer Rating:
Experimental feature: Order Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale Nota Bene) from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale Nota Bene) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780300089226
ISBN: 0300089228
Label: Yale University Press
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 290
Publication Date: 2001-03-01
Publisher: Yale University Press
Studio: Yale University Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780300089226
ISBN: 0300089228
Label: Yale University Press
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 290
Publication Date: 2001-03-01
Publisher: Yale University Press
Studio: Yale University Press
Editorial Review of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale Nota Bene)
This book is the first critical biography of Paul Celan, a German- speaking East European Jew who was Europe's most compelling postwar poet. It tells the story of Celan's life, offers new translations of his poems, and illuminates the connection between Celan's lived experience and his poetry.
Customer Reviews of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale Nota Bene)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: A biography which examines Celan's Jewish identity in order to better grasp the poetry
Review: Much of Paul Celan's later poetry is hermetic, and acknowledge by many to be impossible to truly understand without knowledge of the poet's life. Nonetheless, for a long time English speakers had no biography of this influential modern poet. In PAUL CELAN: Poet, Survivor, Jew author John Felstiner covers the whole course of Celan's all-too-brief life, emphasizing the poet's Jewish identity above others. Besides a simple biography, Felsteiner also discusses a number of Celan's poems, which he himself has translated into English (the book assumes no knowledge of German), and also chronicles Celan's output of translations and his relationship to other (especially Jewish) poets.
For Felstiner, Paul Celan's feelings as a Jew play an important role throughout his poetry, but it seems especially important in the early and late periods over the middle. Celan began his mature career as an orphan whose parents perished in the death camps and who himself served forced labour in wartime Romania. This of course, providing the impetus for not only his famous "Todesfuge", *the* poem on the death camps, but also the imagery of much of his first acknowledged volume. In the last decade of Celan's life, on the other hand, the poet was gripped by paranoia that Germany was not sufficiently acknowledging its sins and that neo-Nazis were plotting against him. This, Celan as representative of a race that has not only suffered before but is still hunted today, Felsteiner sees as an important part of the late works.
If I give this biography only three stars, it is because I wish that there was more information about Celan's life and less exegesis of his poetry. Indeed, Celan's mental distress which sent him more than once to a psychiatric clinic is barely touched upon. Had Felsteiner split this into a more substantial biography and a separate work of criticism, the reader who wants to know about the whole of Celan's life would be better served. Nonetheless, for anyone trying to tackle Celan's poetry in English translation (e.g. Michael Hamburger's collection Poems of Paul Celan), this may be useful
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Black Milk of Daybreak
Review: Paul Celan was born into what soon became the wrong place and time. His family were German-speaking Jews from the eastern reach of the Austrian Empire. They lived in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina region, which passed to Romania just before Celan's birth in 1920. After a nine-month visit to his uncle in Paris where he was exposed to the Surrealists' influence in 1938, then his return to Czernowitz where his studies were interrupted by Soviet and then German occupation in 1940 and 1941, after forced labor in Romania's western mountains, his parents' deportation and death in German-occupied Ukraine, after the Red Army's return in 1944, Celan left home for Bucharest and then Vienna, where he first attracted recognition as a German-speaking poet, and in 1948 he settled in Paris. There he found a haven of sort at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he taught German language and literature to generations of students (some of whom later contributed to his posthumous fame) and pursued his vocation as a poet in exile, estranged from his German mother tongue and survivor of a world that no longer was.
Coming from a homeland that hardly existed anymore, writing for a German audience that he did not live among or trust, residing in France yet undervalued there, Paul Celan's native tongue itself was the only nation he could claim. Yet his relation to the German language was itself problematic, for the Nazis had abused and contaminated the words that once belonged to Goethe and Holderlin. Celan's austere idiom, mindful of death and horror, is rooted in his struggle to realize--by way of uninnocent language--"that which happened", the understatement he used to designate events of 1933-45. As he put it when receiving the City of Bremen's prize for his work in 1958, his language had to "pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, `enriched' by all this."
The biographer gives detailed accounts of several episodes that took a heavy toll on the poet's sensitive feelings: the accusation of plagiarism that accompanied the publication of his first volume in France and that was to resurface later in his carrier; his almost paranoid belief that Nazism was again on the rise in post-war Germany and that Neo-Nazis were orchestrating a machination against him ("you can hardly imagine how things really look again in Germany," he wrote to a friend in 1960.) Paul Celan refused to submit a poem to Martin Heidegger for a Festschrift on his seventieth birthday, mindful of the philosopher's past complicity with Nazism and his enduring failure to recant after the war, but he nonetheless signed the Black Forest hermit's guestbook "with a hope for a coming word in the heart" during a visit to Todtnauberg in 1967.
Recognition came late, and for much of his life was confined to the German-speaking world. When a European Jewish poet's turn came for the Nobel Prize in 1966, the more accessible Nelly Sachs got it, not him. His bouts of depression and psychic distress led to several hospitalizations. The poet concluded his life on the 20th of April 1970 by jumping from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine, drowning himself. On his desk, a biography of Holderlin was found opened to an underlined passage: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart."
John Felstiner devotes a whole chapter to Celan's most well-known poem, Todesfuge. Although similarities with Picasso's Guernica or Yeats's `Easter 1916' come to mind, no work of art has exposed the exigencies of its time so radically as this one, whose speakers--Jewish prisoners tyrannized by a camp commandant--start off with the words: " Schwarze Milch der Fruehe wir trinken sie abends"--"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk"--and evoke the fate that awaits them: "Wir schaufeln ein Grab in der Lueften da liegt man nicht eng" --"we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Crucial for understanding Celan
Review: Todesfuege (Death Fuge) is Celan's most famous poem, although he wrote it when he was only 24. Although it might seem cryptic, it is quite accessible in comparison with his later poems. Felsteiner does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand what Celan must have been like and further allows insight into his poetry in a straightforward, readable way. Because Celan is so difficult to understand, many critics, including Derrida, tend to interpret him in their own images.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Somebody Take a Picture
Review: I appreciate this book most for its study of the relationship between Paul Celan and his most famous poem, "Deathfugue." Before the English translation of that poem in this book is a photograph with the caption, "Orchestra playing 'Death Tango' in Janowska Road Camp, Lvov, ca. 1942." Prisoners used that term "for whatever music was being played when the Germans took a group out to be shot." (p. 30) Before reading this poem, I had read that it was impossible to get permission from the holder of the copyright to translate it into English and publish it, even if an American expert wanted to call it the best poem that had been written in the German language since World War II. The poem may have more meaning for those who already know what it means, and who would not be puzzled by, "We shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A must-read
Review: This is one of the most powerful books imaginable, touching chords in the human heart that we would often choose to ignore. It is the story of a man whose courage and creativity helped him communicate truth in a world that was desperate to silence his voice. Please read this book....it will change everything.
Review Summary: A biography which examines Celan's Jewish identity in order to better grasp the poetry
Review: Much of Paul Celan's later poetry is hermetic, and acknowledge by many to be impossible to truly understand without knowledge of the poet's life. Nonetheless, for a long time English speakers had no biography of this influential modern poet. In PAUL CELAN: Poet, Survivor, Jew author John Felstiner covers the whole course of Celan's all-too-brief life, emphasizing the poet's Jewish identity above others. Besides a simple biography, Felsteiner also discusses a number of Celan's poems, which he himself has translated into English (the book assumes no knowledge of German), and also chronicles Celan's output of translations and his relationship to other (especially Jewish) poets.
For Felstiner, Paul Celan's feelings as a Jew play an important role throughout his poetry, but it seems especially important in the early and late periods over the middle. Celan began his mature career as an orphan whose parents perished in the death camps and who himself served forced labour in wartime Romania. This of course, providing the impetus for not only his famous "Todesfuge", *the* poem on the death camps, but also the imagery of much of his first acknowledged volume. In the last decade of Celan's life, on the other hand, the poet was gripped by paranoia that Germany was not sufficiently acknowledging its sins and that neo-Nazis were plotting against him. This, Celan as representative of a race that has not only suffered before but is still hunted today, Felsteiner sees as an important part of the late works.
If I give this biography only three stars, it is because I wish that there was more information about Celan's life and less exegesis of his poetry. Indeed, Celan's mental distress which sent him more than once to a psychiatric clinic is barely touched upon. Had Felsteiner split this into a more substantial biography and a separate work of criticism, the reader who wants to know about the whole of Celan's life would be better served. Nonetheless, for anyone trying to tackle Celan's poetry in English translation (e.g. Michael Hamburger's collection Poems of Paul Celan), this may be useful
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Black Milk of Daybreak
Review: Paul Celan was born into what soon became the wrong place and time. His family were German-speaking Jews from the eastern reach of the Austrian Empire. They lived in Czernowitz, capital of the Bukovina region, which passed to Romania just before Celan's birth in 1920. After a nine-month visit to his uncle in Paris where he was exposed to the Surrealists' influence in 1938, then his return to Czernowitz where his studies were interrupted by Soviet and then German occupation in 1940 and 1941, after forced labor in Romania's western mountains, his parents' deportation and death in German-occupied Ukraine, after the Red Army's return in 1944, Celan left home for Bucharest and then Vienna, where he first attracted recognition as a German-speaking poet, and in 1948 he settled in Paris. There he found a haven of sort at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he taught German language and literature to generations of students (some of whom later contributed to his posthumous fame) and pursued his vocation as a poet in exile, estranged from his German mother tongue and survivor of a world that no longer was.
Coming from a homeland that hardly existed anymore, writing for a German audience that he did not live among or trust, residing in France yet undervalued there, Paul Celan's native tongue itself was the only nation he could claim. Yet his relation to the German language was itself problematic, for the Nazis had abused and contaminated the words that once belonged to Goethe and Holderlin. Celan's austere idiom, mindful of death and horror, is rooted in his struggle to realize--by way of uninnocent language--"that which happened", the understatement he used to designate events of 1933-45. As he put it when receiving the City of Bremen's prize for his work in 1958, his language had to "pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, `enriched' by all this."
The biographer gives detailed accounts of several episodes that took a heavy toll on the poet's sensitive feelings: the accusation of plagiarism that accompanied the publication of his first volume in France and that was to resurface later in his carrier; his almost paranoid belief that Nazism was again on the rise in post-war Germany and that Neo-Nazis were orchestrating a machination against him ("you can hardly imagine how things really look again in Germany," he wrote to a friend in 1960.) Paul Celan refused to submit a poem to Martin Heidegger for a Festschrift on his seventieth birthday, mindful of the philosopher's past complicity with Nazism and his enduring failure to recant after the war, but he nonetheless signed the Black Forest hermit's guestbook "with a hope for a coming word in the heart" during a visit to Todtnauberg in 1967.
Recognition came late, and for much of his life was confined to the German-speaking world. When a European Jewish poet's turn came for the Nobel Prize in 1966, the more accessible Nelly Sachs got it, not him. His bouts of depression and psychic distress led to several hospitalizations. The poet concluded his life on the 20th of April 1970 by jumping from the Pont Mirabeau into the Seine, drowning himself. On his desk, a biography of Holderlin was found opened to an underlined passage: "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart."
John Felstiner devotes a whole chapter to Celan's most well-known poem, Todesfuge. Although similarities with Picasso's Guernica or Yeats's `Easter 1916' come to mind, no work of art has exposed the exigencies of its time so radically as this one, whose speakers--Jewish prisoners tyrannized by a camp commandant--start off with the words: " Schwarze Milch der Fruehe wir trinken sie abends"--"Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk"--and evoke the fate that awaits them: "Wir schaufeln ein Grab in der Lueften da liegt man nicht eng" --"we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Crucial for understanding Celan
Review: Todesfuege (Death Fuge) is Celan's most famous poem, although he wrote it when he was only 24. Although it might seem cryptic, it is quite accessible in comparison with his later poems. Felsteiner does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand what Celan must have been like and further allows insight into his poetry in a straightforward, readable way. Because Celan is so difficult to understand, many critics, including Derrida, tend to interpret him in their own images.
Felsteiner, on the other hand, is more concerned with portraying Celan accurately than using him as a platform to promote his own agendas. I would strongly recommend this book as an introduction to Celan.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Somebody Take a Picture
Review: I appreciate this book most for its study of the relationship between Paul Celan and his most famous poem, "Deathfugue." Before the English translation of that poem in this book is a photograph with the caption, "Orchestra playing 'Death Tango' in Janowska Road Camp, Lvov, ca. 1942." Prisoners used that term "for whatever music was being played when the Germans took a group out to be shot." (p. 30) Before reading this poem, I had read that it was impossible to get permission from the holder of the copyright to translate it into English and publish it, even if an American expert wanted to call it the best poem that had been written in the German language since World War II. The poem may have more meaning for those who already know what it means, and who would not be puzzled by, "We shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped."
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A must-read
Review: This is one of the most powerful books imaginable, touching chords in the human heart that we would often choose to ignore. It is the story of a man whose courage and creativity helped him communicate truth in a world that was desperate to silence his voice. Please read this book....it will change everything.