Paul Celan: Collected Prose. Translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Octavo, black cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, 67 pp. Near-Fine, with shadowing to ffep; in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: The great German-language poet Paul Celan was introduced to English-speaking readers by Nineteen Poems [Carcanet, 1971], Selected Poems (Penguin, 1972), and Poems (carcanet, 1980), translated by Michael Hamburger. This book of essays, published letters and responses to questionnaires, speeches, and the introductory notes to his versions of Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam, is translated for the first time into English. Prose was generally too noisy a medium, as his translator says, for a poet whose work moved ever closer to silence. Celan's prose is in league with his poetry: there is nothing raucous about it, the very economy of this comprehensive volume is proof of that. And Conversation in the Mountains addresses more directly than any of his poems the condition of being Jewish and profoundly a stranger. Literature, Poetry, Prose, Essay, Jewish, German.