Glottal Stop (Wesleyan Poetry)

by NikolaiPopov (Translator), PaulCelan (Author), HeatherMcHugh (Translator)

New
Paperback
2004
$18.60

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.

Synopsis

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.

$18.60

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 147
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 01 Apr 2004
ISBN 10: 0819567205
ISBN 13: 9780819567208

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

Author Bio

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.