Threadsuns

Overview

Born in Czernowitz -- the capital of the Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine and Rumania) -- in 1920, Paul Celan is now recognized as one of the great poets of the 20th Century. Threadsuns, originally published as Fadensonnen in 1968, two years before Celan's suicide by drowning, continues Sun & Moon Press's commitment to publish the last great works of Celan as translated by the noted poet and critic Pierre Joris.

One of Paul Celan's most important books of poems, Threadsuns ...

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Overview

Born in Czernowitz -- the capital of the Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine and Rumania) -- in 1920, Paul Celan is now recognized as one of the great poets of the 20th Century. Threadsuns, originally published as Fadensonnen in 1968, two years before Celan's suicide by drowning, continues Sun & Moon Press's commitment to publish the last great works of Celan as translated by the noted poet and critic Pierre Joris.

One of Paul Celan's most important books of poems, Threadsuns follows the Sun & Moon press publication of Breathturn, which received international critical acclaim. Consisting of 105 poems, arranged in five cycles, Threadsuns was composed between September 1965 and June 1967. If Breathturn was the opening gambit of Celan's "turn," the entry into the late work, then Threadsuns -- the volume that may have received the least amount of commentary and analysis to date -- may be said to be not only an extension or continuation of the previous volume, but the full-blown realization of Celan's late work.

In fast-paced, shifting moods, and often with a near-desperate sarcasm, Celan collapses his concerns of mind, spirit, and language into a work of great continuity despite its complexity. Yet there are also strong intimations of hope in this work, particularly in the sections written at the moment of the 1967 Israeli victory. Celan also returns in this work to older concerns such as the Kaballa and symbolic numerology. Indeed, Threadsuns represents a truly varied poetic landscape.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Though fluent in a number of languages, Celan (1920-1970), who had come to Paris from Romanian Bukovina, pointedly wrote in German after WWII. His decomposition and recasting of that language, through a style that can seem dizzying in its complex poly-referentiality, was compounded by his erudition, by his own history as a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in the camps, and finally by his suicide. For many, he one of the major poets of the 20th century. Though Celan's work presents obvious difficulties for any translator, his English-language readers have long been well-served by Michael Hamburger's starkly graceful selected translations (Poems of Paul Celan, Persea), which remain the best available, and more recently, by Pierre Joris's acute renderings of Celan's later work. Of the new collections here, the volume from Celan biographer and critic Felstiner is easily the most comprehensive, containing ample cullings from all of Celan's books, including many poems not included in Hamburger's selection, along with previously untranslated early and late work and four prose pieces. Felstiner handles these translations competently, rendering Celan in a somewhat more colloquial style than Hamburger or Joris. But his shifting diction (including "Thou") and his tendency to capitalize nouns and to let German words stand untranslated in the English text can make for a distracting admixture, as it does in Celan's much-anthologized early work, "Deathfugue": "Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night/ we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland." On the whole, Felstiner's efforts often pale beside those of Hamburger and Joris, but the page count of this dual-language collection will make it the default choice of those who will buy only one Celan volume. Popov and McHugh's collection also ranges over Celan's oeuvre, but far less comprehensively or successfully. Unlike Felstiner and Joris, Popov (The Russian People Speak: Democracy at the Crossroads) and poet McHugh (Father of the Predicaments, etc.) don't present the German texts en face, a practice they regard, in their preface, as a potential distraction from the reader's experience of their renderings. It would indeed be a distraction, making painfully clear just how far they depart from the originals to arrive at their idiosyncratic versions, which alter Celan's precise line and stanza lengths significantly, and forsake Celan's vertiginous difficulties for a more simplistic--sometimes macabre or witty--style that's littered with heavy-handed gestures. One poem, for example, contains an ex nihilo insertion gleefully riffing on a German pun, others tip the scales of Celan's carefully weighted pronouns into one viewpoint or another. Even when hewing closer to the source text, Popov and McHugh incessantly heighten the poems' language, degrading their thorniness with more traditional sentiments. Fortunately, many of the poems translated by Popov and McHugh can be found in Joris's new volume, or in his 1995 rendering of Celan's Breathturn, both of which present entire books in razor-sharp, finely nuanced translations. Threadsuns represents the continuation of a marked turn in Celan's poetics--away from lusher effusions to intensely compressed, increasingly stark investigations of language, history and the poet's own capacities. Because much of this later work is serial in nature, Joris's decision to render the books in their entirety is profoundly important, and helps to make them necessary complements to Hamburger's selections. While it may not consistently attain the dazzling heights and depths of Celan's finest work in Breathturn and 1963's The No-One's Rose, Threadsuns contains an abundance of brilliant poems and provides ample evidence for the magnitude of Celan's stature in the last century, and in the one to come. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781557132949
  • Publisher: Sun & Moon Press
  • Publication date: 11/28/2000
  • Language: German
  • Series: Sun and Moon Classics Series
  • Pages: 280
  • Product dimensions: 5.02 (w) x 7.50 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Born in Bukovina (now part of Romania) Celan saw his father and mother die because of the Nazi take over of their country and their imprisonment in camps. He spent most of his life in Paris writing in German before committing suicide. Pierre Joris lives in Albany, New York and teaches of SUNY-Albany.

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Table of Contents

Eyeglances 35
Frankfurt, September 37
Chance, marked 39
Who rules? 41
The trace of a bite 45
In the eternal depth 47
Visible 49
Detourmaps 51
Sackcloth-mold 55
Spasms 57
Your eyes in the arm 59
Hendaye 61
Pau, at night 63
Pau, later 65
The stallion 67
The ounce of truth 69
In the noises 71
Lyon, les archers 73
The heads 77
Where am I 79
The long ago discovered 83
All your seals broken open? Never 85
Sleepmorsels 89
Truth 91
Out of the near 93
Hatched 95
Eternities 97
The dollish saxifrage 99
The between whiles 101
The successful 103
On the rainsoaked spoor 105
Whitesounds 107
The devilish 109
The dark vaccination candidates 111
The second 113
The excavated heart 115
The industrious 117
The colliding 121
In-heavened 123
When I don't know, don't know 125
Inhabited, dishabited 129
Giant 131
Neighed tombprayers 133
The eternities honkytonk 135
Trashwallower-choirs 137
Dedeviled instant 141
Shells 143
Love 145
You were 147
To the right 149
The dismantled taboos 151
Rage-pilgram raids 153
Silence 155
The one 157
By mulled and toiled wine 159
Aslant 161
The heartscriptcrumbled 163
Unkept 165
The unconditional chiming 167
Eternity 169
Late 171
The seedlings 173
Along the hill lines 175
Come 177
Deslagged 179
Soulblind 181
Borderess night 183
Gullchicks 185
Irish 189
The ropes 191
Dew 193
Lavish message 195
This day 197
Oily 199
You with the 201
Out of angel-matter 203
The free-blown lightcrop 205
Line the wordcaves 207
The highworld 209
The muttering 211
... though no kind of 213
Near, in the aortic arch 215
Throw the sunyear 217
Because you found the woe-shard 219
The time has come 221
Lips, erectile tissue 223
Powers, forces 227
Dayparget 229
Speechwalls 231
Orphaned 233
Of both 235
Rolled-away 237
As colors 239
The chimney swallow 241
White 243
Bare one 245
The silence-butt 247
Haut Mal 249
The pigeon egg-size growth 251
Bewintered 253
Outside 255
Who stood the round? 257
Dysposition 259
No name 261
Imagine 263
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