Indeed, at the end, in 1970 he drowned himself in the Seine. As Auden said so well, a crack in his teacup would "open a lane to the land of the Dead" in his heart.Īnd, like Keats, he was "half in love with death," in his obsession. Paul Celan lived his brief lyrical life in the gloomy valley of the shadow of his own death.
It meshed with my own inner arctic trough.īut had I known then that the Spring would curse the world with COVID, I might then have counted myself blessed! I read it during a winter transmogrified by Arctic lows, here in Canada, and what ardent voice it gave to my icy ennui! To read this book is to pop a Jagged Little Pill that chills your innards. "O my Soul, you are so much more beautiful after your Snowstorms!" The work is that of a witness and a visionary. ‘grayer.'" Abandoning the more sumptuous music of the first books, he pared down his compositions to increase the accuracy of the language that now "does not transfigure or render ‘poetical' it names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the possible." In his need for an inhabitable post-Holocaust world, Celan saw that "reality is not simply there it must be searched for and won."īreathturn into Timestead reveals a poet undergoing a profound artistic reinvention. Given "the sinister events in its memory," Celan believed that the language of poetry had to become "more sober, more factual. This collection displays a mature writer at the height of his talents, following what Celan himself called the "turn" ( Wende) of his work away from the lush, surreal metaphors of his earlier verse. Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry gathers the five final volumes of his life's work in a bilingual edition, translated and with commentary by the award-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris. Paul Celan, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth century, created an oeuvre that stands as testimony to the horrors of his times and as an attempt to chart a topography for a new, uncontaminated language and world.
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