Author | Paul Celan |
---|---|
Translator | Pierre Joris |
Language | German |
Publisher | Suhrkamp Verlag |
Publication date | July 1970 |
Published in English | Green Integer, 2005 |
Pages | 108 |
Lichtzwang (rendered in English as Lightduress) is a 1970 German-language poetry collection by Paul Celan. It was written in 1967 and published three months after Celan's death. It was published in an English translation in 2005 by Green Integer.
The book was published in Germany in 1970 through Suhrkamp Verlag. In 2005, an English-language translation by Pierre Joris was published. Joris won the American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for the book; the motivation said that "The translations are consistently alert to the subtle and often bewildering thought-turns of the original, his lyric sense of pause, suspension and onrush can keep pace with the German, and his vast knowledge of Celan's life and world allow vital commentary and annotations. ... [T]his volume is everything a poetic translation should be." [1]
Mark Glanville reviewed the book in Jewish Quarterly in 2005: "In the terse economy of Lichtzwang language has become as constricted as the divine light captured in the kabbalistic kelippot (shells) that Celan alludes to elsewhere, and to which the title of this collection might well refer. We are aware of the poet's battle against the dying of the light, one he eventually lost, but the quality and nature of the struggle is such as to leave us with a body of work by which we continue to be illuminated and inspired." [2]
Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian-born French poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. Due to his many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, Celan regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has an immortal place in the literary pantheon. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
Nelly Sachs was a German–Swedish poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in World War II Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (1950); other works include the poems "Zeichen im Sand" (1962), "Verzauberung" (1970), and the collections of poetry In den Wohnungen des Todes (1947), Flucht und Verwandlung (1959), Fahrt ins Staublose (1961), and Suche nach Lebenden (1971). She was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York.
Rosmarie Waldrop is an American poet, novelist, translator, essayist and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958 and has settled in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is a co-editor and publisher of Burning Deck Press.
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Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and W. G. Sebald from German, and his work in literary criticism. The publisher Paul Hamlyn (1926–2001) was his younger brother.
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourger-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones and The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia Deserta. Other recent books include: A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly ; Adonis and Pierre Joris, Conversations in the Pyrenees ; Stations d'al-Hallaj ; The Book of U. His translation of Egyptian poet Safaa Fathy's Revolution Goes Through Walls came out in 2018 from SplitLevel. In June 2016 the Théatre National du Luxembourg produced his play The Agony of I.B.. Earlier publications include: An American Suite ; Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 ; Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan ; A Voice full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly and The University of California Book of North African Literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album. She is praised for her “diverse, and innovative body of work.”
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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Abhay Kumar [Pen Name Abhay K.] is an Indian poet-diplomat, editor, translator and anthologist. and currently serves as the deputy director general of Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), New Delhi. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 2003 after doing master's in geography at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Kirorimal College, Delhi University. He served as India's 21st ambassador to Madagascar and Comoros from 2019-2022 and as India's Deputy Ambassador to Brazil from 2016-2019. He earlier served as Spokesperson and First Secretary at the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal from 2012-2016 and as Acting Consul General of India in St. Petersburg, and Third/Second Secretary at Indian Embassy, Moscow,Russia from 2005 to 2010. He served as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the Ministry of External Affairs from 2010-2012 and sent out the first tweet on its behalf in 2010 starting a new era of India's Digital Diplomacy.
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John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.
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