Master from Deutschland

But which poets happen to translate well is unpredictable. Paul Celan , a German-speaking Romanian Jew, was long thought untranslatable, his deeply hermetic poetry depending on nuance, ambiguity and verbal duplicity. But Celan, who died in 1970, wrote one of the most famous of post-war poems, “Deathfugue”, a haunting incantation about the Holocaust:

black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air where you won’t lie too cramped

“Death”, he concludes, with German fugues in mind, “is a Master from Deutschland.” The quotation comes from a new translation by Celan’s distinguished biographer, John Felstiner. It is at least the fourth that this reviewer has read and, though not the best of them, it comes across as powerfully as any. Mr Felstiner’s ear is a shade less subtle than his rival Michael Hamburger ’s, but several of his readings are newly illuminating. “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan” is the largest selection yet published and, along with the famous pieces, includes some essays, lectures and early poems. Despite his elusiveness, Celan seems to inspire English translators, so that he, like the much more accessible Czeslaw Milosz , must now be seen as a classic of world literature. /Über neue Übersetzungen von Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky und Paul Celan ins Englische schreibt ein (online) Ungenannter in The economist , 24.1.02