Glottal Stop

101 Poems by Paul Celan

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by Paul Celan,

Translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh

Wesleyan University Press

Due/Published April 2004, 168 pages, paper

ISBN 0819567205

New in paper (S04)

This new selection of translations of Celan's poems focuses on previously untranslated work and opens up facets of his work never before available to readers of English. These translations have been called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai.

"A wonderful, extremely significant book. This new translation has the bold music and expressionistic syntax that Celan's unique voice demands. The compounds and stretches and sound-tangles bring a startling poetic life to English."--Robert Pinksy

Contents

Acknowledgments
PrefaceVoices, scored into
Summer Report
With wine and being lost, with
Threesome, Foursome
Erratic
Hand-
To one who stood outside the door, one
Flung wood
How low could it go, my once immortal word
Pain, the Syllable
La Contrescarpe
Floated down blackwater rapids
Gray-white of sheer
(I know you: you're the one who's bent so low)
Singable remainder - trace
Flooding, big
Go blind at once, today
Ring-narrowing Day under
At high noon, in
The hourglass buried
Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep
Go back and add up
Half-mauled, mask-
From fists white with the truth
Noisemakers shoot into the light: it's the Truth
You forget you forget
Crackpots, decomposing
Lichtenberg's heir-
The sight of the songbirds at dusk
Gurgling, then
Frankfurt, September
Coincidence staged, the signs all38Who
Spasms, I love you, psalms
Night in Pau
Later in Paul
The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion
Lyon, Les Archers
Sleep-pieces, wedges
Attached to out-cast
Graygreens
Chitin sunlings
Eternities dead
Hothouse of an asylum
Lucky, the
On the rainsoaked rutted road
White noises, bundled
Your heart manholed
Here are the industrious
When I don't know, when I don't know
Gigantic
Day freed from demons
Husks of the finite, stretchable
Wet from the world
Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids
Eyeshot's island, broken
Eternity gets older: at
It's late. A fat fetish
Come, we are cutting out
Free of dross, free of dross
Soul-blind behind the ashes
Next-door-neighbor Night
The ropes, stiff with salt water
Out of angel flesh, on
Upholster the word-hollows
Walls of speech, space inwards
Four ells of earth
Naked under death leaves
Stone of incest, rolled away
As loud colors, heaped up
The chimney-swallow, sister
White, white, white
Haut Mal
The golfball growth
Windfield bound for winter: this
Who stood that round?
Audio-visual vestiges in
Knock out
Eternities swept
She of the freckled farewells
Degenerate
Assembly-
Weather hand
Nightsources, distant
Unwashed, unpainted
Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows
You with the dark slingshot
I gave a chance94Proverb on the Wall
The aural apparatus drives a flower
Open glottis, air flow
Raised bog, the shape of
Particles, patriarchs, buried
And force and pain
A reading branch, just one
The cables have already been laid
The splintering echo, darkened
Nowhere, with its silken veil
In the most remote of
O little root of a dream
Don't sign your name
Notes
Index of English Titles/First Lines and German Titles/Half-Titles