Breathturn into Timestead

“I will make the outrageous assertion that Paul Celan reinvented poetry—or invented a new kind of poetry—or took poetry to a place where it had never been before. By definition, such work cannot be translated. Then along comes Pierre Joris, and by some mysterious process of linguistic alchemy, he has managed to translate hundreds of examples of this work, or at least to produce versions that embody the strangeness and power of the originals—and the grand adventure of Celan's late poems lives on in English.” —Paul Auster

“More than a monumental work of scholarship, Pierre Joris’s 40-year project in translation of the later poetry of one of the twentieth century’s most original and “untranslatable” poets is an extraordinary work of poetry in contemporary English. With seeming ease, Joris conveys the complexity and inventiveness of the original German without oversimplifying or domesticating its difficulty, its dark beauty, or the depth of its ideas. His commentary is also of great value in illuminating the background, sources and meanings of Celan’s singular voice." —Judges' citation, 2015 National Translation Award in Poetry

“*Starred Review* Hard to forget and harder to interpret, the dense and astonishing poems of Paul Celan (1920-1970) stand near the center of postwar European letters, and of Jewish writing after the Holocaust . . . To read Joris's Celan is to see not only the insights and the horrors, but also intimacy, sexual jealousy, irony, even humor and hope.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Celan wrote] out of an urgency to reinvent his mother tongue through enigmatic lines and German neologisms. . . . Master translator Joris's extensive introduction and commentary provide vital context for readers less familiar with Celan's linguistic audacity. A priceless compendium.” —Diego Báez, Booklist

“No twentieth-century poet pierces the heart of language with such an exquisite blade as Paul Celan. With Pierre Joris's stunning translations of Celans' late work, along with his exemplary commentaries, it is as if we are reading Celan for the last time, once again.” —Charles Bernstein

“Paul Celan and Pierre Joris work, in this splendid and complex rendering, wonderfully together. Without simplifying, aiming at anything elegantly ‘poetic,' or condensing Celan's anxiously layered otherness, Joris has gotten right to its grayness, what Celan calls ‘the darkness of the poem today . . . a language fragment . . . freighted with world.'” —Mary Ann Caws