An arresting memoir of the final years and tragic suicide of one of
twentieth-century Europe's greatest poets, published on the centenary of
his birth.
"Daive's memoir sensitively conjures a portrait of a man tormented by
both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless remained a
generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and
death."--The New Yorker
"Jean Daive's memoir of his brief but intense spell as confidant and
poetic confrère of Paul Celan offers us unique access to the mind and
personality of one of the great poets of the dark twentieth
century."--J.M. Coetzee
Paul Celan (1920-1970) is considered one of Europe's greatest
post-World-War II poets, known for his astonishing experiments in poetic
form, expression, and address. Under the Dome is French poet Jean
Daive's haunting memoir of his friendship with Celan, a precise yet
elliptical account of their daily meetings, discussions, and walks
through Paris, a routine that ended suddenly when Celan committed
suicide by drowning himself in the Seine. Daive's grief at the loss of
his friend finds expression in Under the Dome, where we are given an
intimate insight into Celan's last years, at the height of his poetic
powers, and as he approached the moment when he would succumb to the
debilitating emotional pain of a Holocaust survivor.
In Under the Dome, Jean Daive illuminates Celan's process of thinking
about poetry, grappling with questions of where it comes from and what
it does: invaluable insights about poetry's relation to history and
ethics, and how poems offer pathways into a deeper grasp of our past and
present. This new edition of Rosmarie Waldrop's masterful translation
includes an introduction by scholars Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard,
which provides critical, historical, and cultural context for Daive's
enigmatic, timeless text.
"Under the Dome breathes with Celan while walking with Celan, walking
in the dark and the light with Celan, invoking the stillness, the
silence, of the breathturn while speaking for the deeply human
necessity of poetry."--Michael Palmer, author of The Laughter of
the Sphinx
"The fragments textured together in this more-than-magnificent rendering
of Jean Daive's prose poem by this master of the word, Rosmarie Waldrop,
grab on and leave us haunted and speechless."--Mary Ann Caws, author
of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism and editor of the
Yale Anthology of Twentieth Century French Poetry
"Rosmarie Waldrop's brilliant translation resonates with her profound
knowledge of both Celan's and Daive's poetry and the passion for
language that she shares with them. The text brings these three major
poets together in a highly unusual and wholly successful
collaboration."--Cole Swensen, author of On Walking On
"Rosmarie Waldrop takes up Celan's question to Jean Daive as her own. I
cannot unread her inimitable ease in these pages. This is a book that
contends with time."--Fady Joudah, author of Footnotes in the Order
of Disappearance
"Daive's writing is a highly punctuated recollection, a memoir, perhaps
a testimony, but also surely a way of attending to the time of the
writing, the conditions and coordinates of Celan's various enunciations,
his linguistic humility. ... Celan's death, what Daive calls 'really
unforeseeable, ' remains as an 'undercurrent' in the conversations
recollected here, gathered up again, with an insistence and clarity of
true mourning and acknowledgement."--Judith Butler, author of The
Force of Nonviolence
