Paul Celan Poetry Group

Startlingly rich, PAUL CELAN SELECTIONS, ed. and with introd. by Pierre Joris, is a gold mine. The introduction is biographical and literary. This is a group translation work:
that credits the translators post text-- Normal Cole, Cid Corman, Robert Kelly, Joachim Neugroschet, Jerome Rothenberg, Rosemarie Waldrop, and, of course, P. Joris-- apart of critical essayists including Jacques Derrida and Friederick Durrenmatt (apologies for missing diacriticals . . . this is an aged dysfunctioning computer excited by the treasury found). Of the critics, Rothenberg is the best known (to me), from his American Indian art and symbolism work, but also because we shared a mutual friend, Jehann Teilhet-Fiske, of Stanford and UCSD, whose specialty was Tahitian and Tongan art. Somehow it brings Celanʻs poems closer -- his enormous, bottomless stomach pit knowing of cruelty, brutality, and, yes, caring as the warmth of a larkʻs song after a devastating srorm. But Rothenbergʻs translations, the English of it, at least (I do not know the level of Celanʻs German), is my generationʻs translation service. Vastly lighter, subtler, and out of sight but keyed to Celanʻs great silences of speech and uncanny multi-tasking usages of sights, sounds, and connotative shifting meanings are Pierre Jorisʻ translations. Joris translations have a fresh grammatical sense, a light, lively instep into syntax originals. Celanʻs originals surprise and awe, in Jorisʻ originals: "SOUNDSCRAPS, VISIONSCRAPS, on/ward onethousandandone,/ daynightly/the Bear Polka:/ they retrain you,/ you again become he." (p.120)) There are many Dicta like this. Their brevity and simplicity adds to the feeling of time fleeting, of gain and sudden loss, of value and sorrow. This work includes Celanʻs prose, letters to his wife, and concise testimonies from the poet and critic Charles Bernstein who says "No 20th c. poet piercs the heart of language with such ane xquisite blade as Paul Celan."

I think there is a study of Celanʻs strategy and technique of writing in what at times feels like a schizophrenic spell of the poetry; but first, one must drink from this "Pierian spring." The smallest draft will carry one far, for the haunted quality of Celanʻs life experiences that shimmer and shine out of dark slits of his incredibly difficult poems to write and challenging poems to read where every word, form, placement, sound, timing, spacing is gifted with beauty in flight, even in the earthy examples of the poetry.

Was Auschwitz the reason for this star burst? I suspect it was the last lode of an impetus that began early, i.e. for instance in being a Romanian and German speaking at a time even the Germans who were Nazis did not recognize his value for their language and certain lines of culture, the other lines destroying the integrity of the man, and his identity as an educated, sophisticated Jew, accidental yet historically central to German progress. Celan is celebrated today among the knowing. He remains to be acclaimed to the world as a world poet, like Ossip Mandelstam, trapped in Russia, and then in the Gulag -- notwithstanding all of which, those of us who have read his poems honour him, as we do Celan, who committed suicide to Mandelstamʻs "natural death" which was not natural at all but equally premature.