[New-Poetry] Re: Paul Celan

[Anny Ballardini]

Excellent, this translation and also Galway Kinnell's reading (he sounds like Pound)
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views 
  Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 8:19 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Re: Paul Celan


  Here's one from my deep vaults:


  Paul Celan


  "I hear that the axe has flowered," 
  you said. It must have been 
  a furious bloom, for the chips that flew 
  to heal you, and then lie 
  soft and harmless on your collar.

  It must have been a flowering 
  when the train rolled 
  from its tunnel, led by a shaft 
  of the purest light, as if
  goodness could roll from the grave.

  Your parents, riding that train, 
  couid not have foreseen 
  an axe gone crazy, glinting 
  black, an axe that would salt 
  and eat its own handle.

  Was it impossible for you 
  in Paris, lecturing 
  to children of the dead? 
  Did I hear you sift down 
  like chalk dusting a classroom?

  Under a desktop in the last row 
  your initials deepen.
  But I will have to stop saying 
  "Imagine Celan, who killed himself."
  Everyone kills himself.


  --fr. *Magic Shows*.  Cleveland University Poetry Center, 1986.


  ========================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu


  Home Page:
  http://web.mac.com/drjazz


  Poetry Library:
  http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
  ==========================================







  On May 7, 2008, at 12:21 PM, shin02143 at aol.com wrote:



    Any Paul Celan fans out there? I just got a book of his German poems translated by Michael Hamburger. The introduction was both fascinating and saddening. He was persecuted by the Nazis but survived the Shoah, yet his parents died in the extermination camps. This left an indelible mark of tragedy on him and he committed suicide at age 49 in 1970. His poems feature fragmentation and neologisms but are very evocative. I've just started studying them. He was an extremely gifted poet, multilingual and well published in his own time.
    Richard


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