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No One's Rose
by Paul Celan translated by David Young
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No One's Rose, translated by David Young
Paperback Publication Date: Fall 2014 120 Pages ISBN13: 978-1-934851-48-7 USD $14.95 + Shipping
This collection is the third of a group of three collections by Celan that he has undertaken to present in their entirety, the first two being From Threshold to Threshold, based on Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, and Language Behind Bars, based on Sprachgitter. |
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About the Author, Paul Celan
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, Romania, to a German-speaking Jewish family. His surname was later spelled Ancel, and he eventually adopted the anagram Celan as his pen name. In 1938 Celan went to Paris to study medicine, but returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. During the war Celan worked in a forced labor camp for 18 months; his parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp, where they eventually died. After escaping the labor camp, Celan lived in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris. In Paris, he translated poetry and taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure. Celan was familiar with at least six languages, and fluent in Russian, French, and Romanian. Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. His first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns, was published in Vienna in 1948; his second collection, Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedaechtnis, 1952), brought him critical acclaim. Katherine Washburn, his translator, noted in her introduction to Last Poems (1986): “The title of this book [Poppy and Memory] pointed with a fine vividness to the central predicament of Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel, heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.” Celan’s later poems often contain brief, fractured lines and stanzas, with compressed and unpredictable imagery, with the forms of the poems echoing the difficulty of finding language for the experiences he witnessed. His poem “Death Fugue” captures the horror of the Holocaust. Celan received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960. He suffered from depression and committed suicide in 1970.
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About the Translator, David Young
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David Young is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently Black Lab, and of Seasoning: A Poet’s Year. He has translated a wide range of poets, including Rilke, Eich, Petrarch, Montale, Holub, Du Fu, Du Mu, and Basho. This collection is the third of a group of three collections by Celan that he has undertaken to present in their entirety, the first two being From Threshold to Threshold, based on Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, and Language Behind Bars, based on Sprachgitter.
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Reviews
“For years I’ve considered David Young to be the best translator now at work in the United States. He brings the same hammered-out mastery and innate lyricism to individual poems as to entire works, and in this way may well be unique. I cannot think of a parallel. The more difficult the work the more likely Young is to find the perfect modern colloquial and emotional equivalents in western prosody. " — Franz Wright
“I admire, especially, his faithfulness in spirit as he becomes a “water-diviner” of Celan’s work. Young is a subtle, trusting reader of the ways this poet of poets took – as he had to – to create a completely new poetry. " — Jean Valentine
“David Young is a poet who has long devoted himself to translation. I am in agreement with Young that at this point we need more translations of whole books rather than more selections . . . I am grateful for his work. And this incredibly close-knit book certainly bears him out." — Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic
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