Paul Celan is widely recognized as the greatest and most studied postwar European poet. His poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust, at once demanding and highly rewarding. This new selection of translations of Celan's poems focuses on previously untranslated work and opens up facets of his oeuvre never before available to readers of English. An ear, cut off, is listening. 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 . . .
Nikolai Popov, a Joyce scholar, is present here too, bringing his 'logician's nature' to bear on Celan's labyrinthine philosophical gestures. 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. But Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh have done just that . . . The results are as moving as they are meticulous.