Glottal Stop / Edition 1

by Paul Celan, Nikolai Popov, Heather McHugh

Overview

Rich new translations of one of the most important poets of our time.

Winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001)

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work—his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819567208
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2004
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Edition description:	Trans. from the German
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

NIKOLAI POPOV teaches English at the University of Washington in Seattle. A James Joyce scholar and translator, he also co-translated with Heather McHugh a collection of the poems of Blaga Dimitrova (Wesleyan, 1989). HEATHER MCHUGH is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. In addition to seven acclaimed books of poetry and the collection of essays Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan, 1994), she has translated poems by Jean Follain and Euripides' Cyclops.

Read an Excerpt

Wet from the world
the scrapped taboos --
and all the bordercrossings between them,
pursuing
meaning, fleeing
meaning

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Preface	xi
	Glottal Stop
	Voices, scored into	1
	Summer Report	4
	With wine and being lost, with	5
	Threesome, Foursome	6
	Erratic	7
	Hand-	8
	To one who stood outside the door, one	9
	Flung wood	11
	How low could it go, my once immortal word	12
	Pain, the Syllable	13
	La Contrescarpe	15
	Floated down blackwater rapids	17
	Gray-white of sheer	18
	(I know you: you're the one who's bent so low	19
	Singable remainder--trace	20
	Flooding, big	21
	Go blind at once, today	22
	Ring-narrowing Day under	23
	At high noon, in	25
	The hourglass buried	25
	Behind the charcoal surfaces of sleep	26
	Go back and add up	27
	Half-mauled, mask-	28
	From fists white with the truth	29
	Noisemakers shoot into the light: it's the Truth	30
	You forget you forget	31
	Crackpots, decomposing	32
	Lichtenberg's heir-	33
	The sight of the songbirds at dusk	34
	Gurgling, then	35
	Frankfurt, September	36
	Coincidence staged, the signs all	38
	Who	39
	Spasms, I love you, psalms	40
	Night in Pau	41
	Later in Pau	42
	The ounce of truth in the depths of delusion	43
	Lyon, Les Archers	44
	Sleep-pieces, wedges	45
	Attached to out-cast	46
	Graygreens	47
	Chitin sunlings	48
	Eternities dead	49
	Hothouse of an asylum	50
	Lucky, the	51
	On the rainsoaked rutted road	52
	White noises, bundled	53
	Your heart manholed	54
	Here are the industrious	55
	When I don't know, when I don't know	56
	Gigantic	57
	Day freed from demons	58
	Husks of the finite, stretchable	59
	Wet from the world	60
	Hush, you hag, and ferry me across the rapids	61
	Eyeshot's island, broken	62
	Eternity gets older: at	63
	It's late. A fat fetish	64
	Come, we are cutting out	65
	Free of dross, free of dross	66
	Soul-blind behind the ashes	67
	Next-door-neighbor Night	68
	The ropes, stiff with salt water	69
	Out of angel flesh, on	70
	Upholster the word-hollows	71
	Walls of speech, space inwards	72
	Four ells of earth	73
	Naked under death leaves	74
	Stone of incest, rolled away	75
	As loud colors, heaped up	76
	The chimney-swallow, sister	77
	White, white, white	78
	Haut Mal	79
	The golfball growth	80
	Windfield bound for winter: this	81
	Who stood that round?	82
	Audio-visual vestiges in	83
	Knock out	84
	Eternities swept	85
	She of the freckled farewells	86
	Degenerate	87
	Assembly-	88
	Weather hand	89
	Nightsources, distant	90
	Unwashed, unpainted	91
	Lilac twilight daubed with yellow windows	92
	You with the dark slingshot	93
	I gave a chance	94
	Proverb on the Wall	95
	The aural apparatus drives a flower	96
	Open glottis, air flow	97
	Raised bog, the shape of	98
	Particles, patriarchs, buried	99
	And force and pain	100
	A reading branch, just one	101
	The cables have already been laid	103
	The splintering echo, darkened	104
	Nowhere, with its silken veil	104
	In the most remote of	105
	O little root of a dream	107
	Don't sign your name	108
	Notes	109
	Index of English Titles/First Lines and German Titles/Half-Titles	141

What People are Saying About This

Robert Pinksy

"A wonderful, extremely significant book. This new translation has the bold music and expressionistic syntax that Celan's unique voice demands. The compounds and stretches and sound-tangles bring a startling poetic life to English."

Robert Pinksy

"A wonderful, extremely significant book. This new translation has the bold music and expressionistic syntax that Celan's unique voice demands. The compounds and stretches and sound-tangles bring a startling poetic life to English."

From the Publisher

"A wonderful, extremely significant book. This new translation has the bold music and expressionistic syntax that Celan's unique voice demands. The compounds and stretches and sound-tangles bring a startling poetic life to English."—Robert Pinksy

Editorial Reviews

"In 'Glottal Stop,' the translators...take greater risks...but the poetic rewards are...at times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound..."—Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review

"If any American poet can render Celan's knotty German into English it's McHugh, who's justly praised for her linguistic facility and quickness. Couple this with Popov's scholarly notes and annotations — he seems to have tracked down nearly every conceivable reference embedded in these poems — and the result is a thrilling excursion that gives the lie to the long-standing belief that late Celan is untranslatable."—San Francisco Chronicle

"The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative."—J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

"In 'Glottal Stop,' the translatorstake greater risksbut the poetic rewards areat times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound"—Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review

"Heather McHugh, herself a renowned poet, has an ear for the dense and difficult music of Celan's language, and one can hear overtones of her distinctive voice . . . Nikolai Popov, a Joyce scholar, is present here too, bringing his 'logician's nature' to bear on Celan's labyrinthine philosophical gestures. The tug-of-war between these impulses toward lyric intimacy and analytical distance mirrors the tension between Celan's love of language and his knowledge of its limitations. The result is something like a volume of Heidegger into which someone has slipped a handful of achingly beautiful love letters . . . It is a broken, distinctly human music that Popov and McHugh render in English in Glottal Stop."—Voice Literary Supplement

"A wonderful, extremely significant book. This new translation has the bold music and expressionistic syntax that Celan's unique voice demands. The compounds and stretches and sound-tangles bring a startling poetic life to English."—Robert Pinksy

From the Publisher

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.\

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Glottal Stop, the translators Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov (she is a poet, he is a professor of comparative literature) take greater risks than either Joris or Felstiner but the poetic rewards are incomparably greater, at times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound: ''Voices, scored into / the waters' green./ When the kingfisher dives, / the split second whirs.'' Dispensing with Celan's German on the facing page, McHugh and Popov demand that their English versions be read for themselves, without the line-by-line comparison with the original that ''fatally distracts'' the reader's attention from ''the experience of a poem's coursing, cumulative power.'' Their endnotes, more copious than the occasional glosses provided by Joris or Felstiner, give the reader a real sense of the German poem, its philosophical depths as well as the concrete difficulties it poses to translation.
—New York Times Book Review

Mark M. Anderson