Poems of Paul Celan

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by Paul Celan,

Translated by Michael Hamburger

W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Due/Published November 1990, 353 pages, paper

ISBN 0892551348

The peerless translations of this haunted—and haunting—Holocaust poet, including ten new poems and an illuminating essay by the translator. Paul Celan is one the twentieth century's most essential poets, and twenty-two years after its publication, Poems of Paul Celan continues to be the single truest access for English-speakers to this poet's work. This new edition adds ten more poems and a significant essay, "On Translating Celan" by Michael Hamburger.

 A Romanian Jew, Paul Celan was born in 1920. He survived the death of both of his parents at the hands of the Nazis and eighteen months in a labor camp before escaping to Paris, where he spent most of his adult life. Celan was never able to overcome his sense of loss and alienation following the Second World War, and he died, a suicide, in 1970. For his Celan translations, Michael Hamburger was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, and the prestigious Goethe medal.