Poems of Paul Celan
Author | : Paul Celan |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 440 |
Release | : 2007 |
ISBN-10 | : STANFORD:36105124065132 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (32 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: This is a new, revised edition of an Anvil Classic. Paul Celan was one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in a German enclave of Romania, his life and work were indelibly marked by the Holocaust: his parents perished in a camp, he was lucky to survive. The Jewish experience and the force of history stretched language, and Celan himself, beyond breaking point. Celan committed suicide in Paris in 1970, but not before he had remade and reclaimed German as a language fit for poets. Celan spoke of a language 'north of the future' and described his poems as messages in bottles that might never be received.