Language Behind Bars: Paul Celan's Sprachgitter

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by David Young. Cover art by the author's wife, Gisele Celan-Lestrange. "Celan's English language readers, and readers to come, will be deeply grateful for this new translation of his second book. I admire David Young's clear and respectful introduction, generous to his colleagues in Celan translation, and helpful in providing a broad context for this poetry; and I admire, especially, his faithfulness in spirit as he becomes a 'water-diviner' of Celan's work. Young is a subtle, trusting reader of the ways this poet of poets took—as he had to—to create a completely new poetry."—Jean Valentine

This collection is the second of three by Celan that David Young is undertaking to present in their entirety. He works at present as an editor at Oberlin College Press.

Paul Celan, now widely acknowledged as one the most important poets of the twentieth century, built a poetic vocabulary with which to express, slowly and painfully, the losses he had endured: his parents, victims of the Nazi death-camps; his fellow Jews of Europe; his native country, Romania, from which he fled the Stalinist takeover; and the poetic language, German, which had been so thoroughly corrupted and misused by the Third Reich. His reconstituting of German as a literary language, along with other writers like Günter Eich and Nelly Sachs, remains one of the most redemptive acts of our time. He died in 1970.