For Celan, whose poems moved ever closer to silence, prose was too noisy a medium. It is indeed fortunate that various occasions prodded him to write these texts. They are invaluable for defining the place from which Celan writes.
— Rosmarie Waldrop, from the Introduction
The essential prose works of the great Paul Celan, beautifully translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
“I am supposed to tell you some of the words I heard deep down in the sea where there is much silence and so much happens.” So begins the first text in this indispensable volume, which includes: “Edgar Jené and the Dream about the Dream,” “Backlight,” “The Meridian,” and the piece which Celan himself deemed his most important, “Conversation in the Mountains.” George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker that Celan’s prose was “transforming the landscape of poetic theory and of the philosophy of language.” This collection of essays, speeches, and letters (as well as notes on Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam) is a great gift to readers and to anyone who wishes to understand the twentieth century. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “Paul Celan’s poems reach us, but we miss them.” Perhaps through these rare prose texts we may find the key to what we missed.
For Celan, whose poems moved ever closer to silence, prose was too noisy a medium. It is indeed fortunate that various occasions prodded him to write these texts. They are invaluable for defining the place from which Celan writes.
— Rosmarie Waldrop, from the Introduction
Celan stands within the tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke. Despite the difficulties his work offers the reader, he is a public poet, a writer concerned with the great events of the time. He stands in the same relation to the world of the massacres as does the author of Lear to the cruelty, poverty, and madness of his time.
— J. M. Cameron, The New York Review of Books
These writings provide an exquisite insight into Celan's poetry, and into the form, then and today... For Celan, strangeness, or estrangedness is an instance of truth—the strange, the wonderful, and the true are collapsed.
— Theodore Anderson, Newcity Lit
This recent arrival provides enormous insight into how Celan's many personal devils meshed to create one of the great bodies of work in 20th-century poetry. Rosmarie Waldrop's translation casts complementary light on Celan.
— Mitchell Abidor, Los Angeles Review of Books
The most consequential postwar German-language poet, Paul Celan performed one of the 20th century's strangest acts of literary fidelity: He remained true to German by forcing it to answer for what had been done in its name.
