Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry: A Bilingual Edition

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Translated by the prizewinning translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Paul Celan's collected later poetry. Finally, Celan's readers are able to read his work in full, with a new introduction and expert commentary from Joris. Celan, a Romanian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, displays his sharp ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. The work, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the reader witnesses Celan's poems, which start lush with surrealistic imagery and become pared down, with the syntax growing tighter and his trademark neologisms and word-creations increasing. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century. This volume includes Sprachgitter, Die Niemandsrose, Mohn und Gedachtnis, and Von schwelle zu Schwelle.

Reviews

For half a century Pierre Joris has been living with the poetry of Paul Celan. With the publication of Breathturn into Timestead and Memory Rose into Threshold Speech his life's task is completed: a rendering into English of the entire German oeuvre of one of the great poetic presences of the twentieth century. Joris's translations are supple, lively, and as close as we will ever get to the sense of a body of poetry that continually challenges the boundaries of language. --J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Celan's poetry is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, it has been singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of Celan's work in quasi-religious terms . . . Pierre Joris, in the introduction to "Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his new translation of Celan's first four published books, writes that hearing Celan's poetry read aloud, at the age of fifteen, set him on a path that he followed for fifty years . . . Joris's extensive commentary is a gift to English readers. --Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

Compiling Celan's first four books into one volume highlights his growth as a writer and thinker, paring language to its essentials. --The New York Times

What a privilege to read Paul Celan, one of the great voices of contemporary poetry, through Pierre Joris. --Katherine Hedeen, Kenyon Review

This ambitious bilingual edition completes Joris's herculean effort to translate all of Celan's poetry into English . . . Joris's introduction and commentary provide useful historical and literary context. This admirable translation presents the early work of an eminent German language postwar poet to a new audience. --Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, in 1920, and is considered by many to be the greatest German-language poet of the second half of the twentieth century. He survived the Holocaust and settled in Paris in 1948, where he lived and wrote until his suicide in 1970. Pierre Joris is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, essays, translations, and anthologies, most recently Arabia (not so) Deserta and, with Adonis, Conversations in the Pyrenees. Joris is the editor and translator of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. In 2005 he received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Celan's Lichtzwang/Lightduress.