Instead, he emerges as a cautious advocate. But some projects raise questions. Manning doesn't know. Reading this dizzying catalog of countries, crops, intractable problems, and piecemeal solutions, it's easy to comprehend the yearning for some fabulous high-tech solution, and to hell with the consequences. Some promising work on potatoes aside, Manning says, that's highly unlikely.
Survival is in the details.
In 1942, his parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp, where they both died his father of typhus, his mother of a gunshot to the throat. Celan himself was confined in a Nazi internment camp in southern Moldavia. In 1947 he fled Romania for Vienna, settling one year later in Paris, where he remained until his suicide by drowning in 1970. The poems in Glottal Stop , a new translation of 101 of Celan's later poems, are full of references to this double identity. Celan seeks words capable of speaking what he has witnessed, and to this end he rewrites the rules.