Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's
first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his
reputation as a major post-World War II German-language poet.
Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work
that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint
totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is
not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and
desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In
Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan's reader witnesses his
poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually
pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word
formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that
tries, in the poet's own words, to measure the area of the given and the
possible.
Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this
bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into
Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's
poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations,
accompanied here by a new introduction, as well as extensive commentary
by Joris and Barbara Wiedemann. The four volumes in this edition show
the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.
This volume collects Celan's first four books: Mohn und Gedächtnis
(Poppy and Memory), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Threshold to
Threshold), Sprachgitter (Speechgrille), and Die Niemandsrose
(NoOnesRose).
