Conversation in the Mountains: Collected Prose of Paul Celan

by Paul Celan, Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

Overview

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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811240529
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/05/2026
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

PAUL CELAN (1920-1970) was born Paul Antschel of a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Romania. He was sent to a labor camp during World War II.  After the war, he settled in Paris where he lived with his wife Gisèle Lestrange until his death. He is widely considered to be one of the most innovative and important poets of the twentieth century.

ROSMARIE WALDROP, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction.

Editorial Reviews

"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’s work is jolting by design, often seeming to herald from an alien universe… He delivers cloudy pronouncements in the cryptic yet authoritative tones of a prophet."— Becca Rothfeld The Poetry Foundation

"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

From the Publisher