Poems of Paul Celan

The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990. Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, 'almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.' He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970. This third Anvil edition of Michael Hamburger's selected translations now includes the previously uncollected longer poem "Wolf's Bean", several additional short poems, and the essay "On Translating Celan" in which he discusses the challenges faced over many years in his engagement with Celan's poetry. The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990.

About the Author :
Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924. He came to Britain in 1933, and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He is known both as a distinguished poet and as the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. He has received many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the first edition of Paul Celan: Poems in 1981 and the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for his services to German literature. He lives in Suffolk.In addition to his many collections of poetry - five have appeared since his Collected Poems 1941-1994 - he has published several collections of essays, a notable critical study The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography. Other translations published by Anvil are Goethe: Roman Elegies and other poems; Holderlin: Poems and Fragments; Huchel: The Garden of Theophrastus; and Rilke: Turning-Point (poems 1912-1926).

Review :
"How am I to proceed? The self-evident impulse is to say, 'Go and buy this book. Insist that your bookstore order it if it has not yet done so. Borrow it from a friend while you wait for your own copy. Steal it if you must. But, now that Celan is in some measure available in English, let him enter your life. At risk. Knowing that he will change it." - GEORGE STEINER, THE NEW YORKER "Michael Hamburger has been translating Celan for many years... his translations have acquired a legendary status as some of the best of the century." - PETER FORBES, THE INDEPENDENT "I'm reading the Anvil Press edition of the poems of Paul Celan, a very great poet whose work I didn't know. It sends shivers down my spine - it's terrible, moving, extraordinary, and changes your ideas about language." - A.S. BYATT, THE SUNDAY TIMES "Celan stands within the tradition of Holderlin and Rilke and it seems the common judgement of competent critics that his achievement is not less than theirs... Michael Hamburger's translation is a great achievement also... It is a memorable volume and will influence our moral outlook and the practise of poetry for a long time to come." - THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS "In poetry the event of the year for me was Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (Anvil Press): difficult but immensely rewarding work, superbly rendered into English." - JOHN BANVILLE, THE SUNDAY TIMES"