Pierre Joris

Translator's Statement

This project will be the culmination of my 45-year involvement with the work of Paul Celan. It will add the two posthumously published volumes (Schneepart / Snowshare and Zeitgehöft / Timestead) as well as a range (about 50 pages) of uncollected poems, to be translated for this project, to my reworked translations of the three first volumes of his later poetry. The latter, which I first translated in the late '60s and '70s are Atemwende /Breathturn, Fadensonnen/ Threadsuns and Lichtzwang / Lightduress, which were published by sun&moon press and Green Integer between 1995 and 2005, but are now all out of print. As I started to do in "Breathturn," I will continue to add and expand a series of commentaries on the individual poems -- given the complexity of the poems this is a necessary undertaking and part and parcel of a wider sense of 'translation' -- and add a translator's introduction. Revision of the first three volumes is necessary not only due to the work's complexity, but also because since the time I did those translations, more than 6,000 items (books and articles) of Celan scholarship have been published. This scholarly work is very useful for the translator, as it throws a much-needed light on historical, linguistic, thematic, and cultural aspects that underlie the work of the poet.

This "Later collected" volume will gather for the first time in one book the complete five final collections of what is no doubt one of the most ambitious and complex oeuvres of any 20th-century poet. Celan's method of composition for the post-"Wende" work became 'serial' in nature, i.e. rather than insisting on individual, titled poems, he moved toward a method of composition by cycles and volumes. This means that selecting a few poems (usually because they 'feel' more understandable and translatable than others) for translation and inclusion in a book of 'selected' poems, is something of a betrayal of the author's intentions and poetics. This project thus wants to redress that situation by bringing together the complete late volumes in their sequence of composition, a sequence that also meaningfully throws light on the oeuvre.