Snow Part / Schneepart

Celan Paul

A few months before his death, Paul Celan described "Schneepart" as his "strongest and boldest" book. A response to the turbulent events of 1968 – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the attempted assassination of a student leader in Berlin – the collection is haunted by images of earlier violence and resistance in a dark European century: the hanging of anti-Hitler conspirators in 1944, the shooting of Rosa Luxembourg in 1919. These are poems of an Ice Age, their terrain the clarity of the limestone alp with its subterranean presence of caves and abysses.

"Snow Part" is the first translation of "Schneepart" to be published in English. Its seventy poems were written between December 1967 and October 1968, and published in 1971, a year after Celan's death. To this volume, Ian Fairley adds some twenty posthumously published poems closely linked to Schneepart.

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.

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