For many, he one of the major poets of the 20th century. His decomposition and recasting of that language, through a style that can seem dizzying in its complex poly-referentiality, was compounded by his erudition, by his own history as a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in the camps, and finally by his suicide. Though fluent in a number of languages, Celan (1920-1970), who had come to Paris from Romanian Bukovina, pointedly wrote in German after WWII. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. John Bayley wrote in the New York Review of Books, 'Felstiner translates. John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work.

All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages.

This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. Self-exiled in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had 'passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.' His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote 'Todesfuge' ('Deathfugue'), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet, including previously unpublished writings.

Selected poems and prose of paul celan