Review (PDF) Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (German Edition)
2015 National Translation Award Winner in PoetryPaul Celan, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, created an oeuvre that stands as testimony to the horrors of his times and as an attempt to chart a topography for a new, uncontaminated language and world. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris. This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" (Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual . . . ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical'; it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won." Breathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. The work is that of a witness and a visionary.
Hardcover: 736 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Bilingual edition (December 2, 2014)
Language: German
ISBN-10: 0374125988
ISBN-13: 978-0374125981
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 2.4 x 9.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #211,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #43 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Regional & Cultural > European > German #174 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > European > German
At this writing there are only 6 reviews of this amazing book, and 3 of them are complaints about the binding and the paper. Please don’t be deterred by qualms about the book’s presentation and durability. I’ve spent the last month immersed in these pages—book-marking, referencing, writing notes in the margins, lugging the 2.5 lb. marvel around with me, splaying it out on occasion—and it has held up just fine. While it’s not a deluxe edition, neither is it prohibitively expensive. The paper is of average thickness—not notably thin—and was probably chosen because, at 650 pages, heavier stock would have made the volume size unwieldy. This book is extraordinary—both Celan’s poetry and Joris’s illumination of it—and to disregard that while complaining about the paper is absurd.Pierre Joris has spent the last 40 years in devoted “apprenticeship” to Celan’s work, and his lengthy introduction and 170 pages of commentary domuch to open these final cryptic books to broader understanding. Many people admire Celan in theory but find his later poetry too difficult—here Joris has provided great help, both on a scholarly level and with an impassioned and intuitive feeling for the work. He does a fine job of explication without dulling any of the masterful ambiguity that allows these poems to be experienced in different ways at different times. His painstaking translations honor the originals without deadening them. The poems are still “difficult” –in part because they are so emotionally charged and soul-wrenching—but they don’t refuse a thoughtful reader. References to concrete events, people, objects, and landscapes are generally there, locked into the complex of each word-puzzle, if there is an effort to find them. Joris has provided innumerable and invaluable keys.
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