"Fathomsuns" and "Benighted"

Celan Paul

Paul Celan is the greatest German-language poet after Rilke. His "intolerable wrestle with words and meanings" evolved an inimitable originality. He dominates literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust by means of his attempt to redeem the human tongue from its terrible history.

"Fathomsuns", published in 1968, is his longest collection and one of his most ambitious. Benighted is a sequence of 11 poems. It appeared in an anthology of "abandoned works" by various authors published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1968. Translated here in full for the first time, these works show Celan at his most provocative and unassimilable.

For Celan, writing such as this "names and places, attempts to measure the range of the given and the possible". The language, twisted, broken and restored, engages the world urgently; how it reckons with past and present is imperatively urgent. After years of refinement Ian Fairley's award-winning translations bring the English reader as close as he is likely to come to these compact, mighty acts of resistance, provocation and lament.

About the Author

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born Paul Antschel 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 gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in German in 1952. His earliest poems were written in Romanian and have been translated by, among others, his friend Nina Cassian. He was a fine translator of poetry, mainly from French, English, Russian and Romanian. His mysterious meeting with Martin Heidegger was the subject of a radio play by John Banville.

Reviews

Awards won by Paul Celan
Winner, 1990 European Poetry Translation Prize (Poems of Paul Celan)

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