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“... of judgment ... are invested in the overnight.’ After all, who would set Toni Morrison next to Paul Celan? And lest this reference to black women writers of the Eighties appear a random example, we might look at Steiner’s musings on the relation between gender and art. He considers the act of aesthetic creativity an imitation of God’s fiat. ‘In ...”

“... and Amis and their followers, open to the influence of Europeans, especially the Surrealists and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York poets. When I look back on it now, it’s clear that Quin’s writing sits more easily alongside this internationalist milieu. She was ...”

“... us a three-page prophecy about which writers will be doing what in the 21st and 22nd centuries (‘Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059’). This narrator, who first appears and tells a ...”

“... than Pennington can offer and he was capable of a verbal dazzle that makes him sound at times like Paul Muldoon. Pennington’s language is far more formal. Francis Jones, who expanded and revised the Collected Poems, is aware of the problem. Popa’s ‘words and images are multi-layered’, Jones says, ‘combining concrete representations with ...”

“... Yeats​ was a great admirer of Paul Valéry’s poem ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘The Graveyard by the Sea’), but only up to a point – the point where he thought that the poem’s main injunction was not about lingering among the tombs and talking to the dead, but about getting on with life, or trying to. ‘After certain poignant stanzas,’ Yeats wrote, ‘and just when I am deeply moved, he chills me ...”

“... Petersburg in 1917-18, in spite of the poem’s vivid affirmation of local colour and sound. Even Paul Celan, by far the greatest poet to confront the holocaust age, transforms its horrors by the sheer intensity and individuality of his skills, in poems like ‘Espenbaum’ and ‘Engführung’. Akhmatova’s success in Requiem is much simpler and in a ...”

“... waver/Into language. Do not waver in it,’ Heaney says to himself, but that’s as hopeless as Paul Celan telling himself to ‘rise up against/multiple meanings.’ The fact that these poets issue such instructions to themselves at all is proof that they need to.A hankering (perhaps as much for his sake as for mine) for an unofficial Heaney – along ...”

“... as ‘man, monotonous universe’; on the other hand, there is little that could have been gained. Paul Celan was attracted by this later writing and translated much of it into German, but English poets have been less impressed. One could not compile a volume of responses by diverse hands to rival the recent Penguin anthology of Montale translations. The ...”

“... memorial. The ‘ashen-haired’ Sulamith and the ‘golden-haired’ Margarethe are from Paul Celan’s Todesfugue; the loss of Sulamith is a symbol of the Holocaust. Political reunification in 1990 restored the former east, but the real ‘other half’ of German history, the Jewish part, could never be restored. Kiefer’s range of subject ...”

“... her own head, or in our time, or in the ancient world. Carson wrote in Economy of the Unlost that Paul Celan ‘uses language as if he were always translating’: we could say the same thing about her. Her translations usually sound like the rest of her poems, obtrusively contemporary but studiedly idiosyncratic, plainly weird (they may reflect their ...”

“... smoke you will rise into air Then a grave you will have in the clouds There one lies unconfined Paul Celan wrote in ‘Todesfuge’. These dead can generally be reburied only symbolically. Ashes are gathered from Eastern Europe’s death camps and newly interred under gravestones. At Père Lachaise they lie near the Mur des Fédérés, where the last ...”

“... of language to do justice to the dead. In his acknowledgments at the end of the book Peace cites Paul Celan and Heiner Müller, two writers who have stress-tested the weak bonds between words, meanings and extreme human acts. But Occupied City represents the most extreme stage of an experimental process that Peace began in the first part of Red Riding ...”

“... microphysically.Wrong Norma ends on a beautifully blurred evocation of a famous failed event, Paul Celan’s encounter with Martin Heidegger. A version of the piece appeared in the LRB of 6 January 2022 as the first of ‘Four Talks’:Celan came up the mountain to visit the philosopher. He came on a wooden cart ...”

“... brought him the greatest acclaim of his entire career; his mountain hut in Todtnauberg, visited by Paul Celan in 1967, became something of a place of pilgrimage; and when, finally, a Russian philosopher wrote to him that in the Soviet Union, too, his reading of Hölderlin’s ‘lament for the absent gods’ was being accepted as a valid reading of the ...”

“... Paul Auster is an amphibious writer whose eclectic methods and influences make one unsure by which end to try and grasp him. His early self-exile to an apprenticeship in Paris as a poet and translator, absorbing the lessons of the ‘high’ aesthetic rigorists – Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan – was an unexpected preliminary to his return to America and, after several years, his dark, formally self-conscious entry onto the scene of the American novel with The New York Trilogy, an elaborate anti-detective volume full of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau ...”