Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.
Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan's writing a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Celan's reader witnesses his poetry, which starts lush with surrealistic imagery, become gradually pared down; its syntax tightens and his trademark neologisms and word formations increase toward a polysemic language of great accuracy that tries, in the poet's own words, "to measure the area of the given and the possible."
Translated by the prize-winning poet and translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the 2014 publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Celan's collected later poetry. All nine volumes of Celan's poetry are now available in Joris's carefully crafted translations, accompanied here by a new introduction and extensive commentary. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.
"Celan's poetry is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. Perhaps for this reason, it has been singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of Celan's work in quasi-religious terms . . . Pierre Joris, in the introduction to "Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his new translation of Celan's first four published books, writes that hearin
Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker
"Compiling Celan's first four books into one volume highlights his growth as a writer and thinker, paring language to its essentials."
The New York Times
"For half a century Pierre Joris has been living with the poetry of Paul Celan. With the publication of Breathturn into Timestead and Memory Rose into Threshold Speech his life's task is completed: a rendering into English of the entire German oeuvre of one of the great poetic presences of the twentieth century. Joris's translations are supple, lively, and as close as we will ever get to the sense
J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
