Black Milk Todesfuge the Poetry of Paul Celan

PaulCelan_NewBioImage
 
Paul Celan (/ˈsɛlæn/; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a German language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți (German: Czernowitz), in the then Kingdom of Romania, (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine), and adopted the pseudonym “Paul Celan”. (Celan in Romanian is pronounced Chelàn, and was derived from the syllables of his surname). He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.
 
Celan remained imprisoned in a work-camp until February 1944, when the Red Army’s advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death.
 
A version of Celan’s poem Todesfuge appeared as “Tangoul Morţii” (“Death Tango”) in a Romanian translation of May 1947. Additional remarks were published explaining that the dancing and musical performances evoked in the poem were images of realities of the extermination camp life.
 
Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan’s sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband’s work. Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960
 
Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in Paris, around April 20, 1970.
 
The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (The Holocaust) are defining forces in Celan’s poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.
 

An Animated English Translation of Paul Celan’s famous work Todesfuge
 

Here it is read in the original German by its author Paul Celan
 

 
A further English translation where Todesfuge (Death Fuge) is entitled Black Milk
 

*Editors note: The actual Reading of Paul Celan’s works in original text German together with their English translations starts appx 28 minutes after a lengthy introduction

 
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Robin Ouzman Hislop, Publisher of Poetry Life and Times and Artvilla’s Poetry Editor

 

Robin Ouzman Hislop was editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life and Times from 2005, previously edited by Sara Russell, after its closure in 2008, he joined with Dave Jackson editor/admin as co editor at  https://motherbird.com & Artvilla.com  in 2013 & now edits both Poetry Life and Times  with its Facebook page  PoetryLifeTimes .

He’s been previously published in a variety of international magazines, which include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina, The Poetic Bond  series and  an Anthology of Sonnets Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. His publications include All the Babble of the Souk and Cartoon Molecules collected poems and Key of Mist the recently published Tesserae translations from Spanish poets Guadalupe Grande and Carmen Crespo 

visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop for more information and reviews, him performing some of his work at  Performance (University of Leeds) and his latest volume of collected poems at Next-Arrivals

Submittals may be sent to robin@artvilla.com or editor@artvilla.com  Please refer to our submittal guidelines at any of the sites.

 

End Game. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Robin

 

i.)
 
Is the plot,
at my window with a broken wing.
 
ii.)
 
Time unreal,
to the last syllable of recorded time.
 
iii.)
 
That is the question,
to quantum or not to quantum, mind.
 
iv.)
 
Race against extinction,
a computer brain outside time without extension.
 
v.)
 
Before the apocalypse,
a history of births and deaths and trinkets of fame.
 
vi.)
 
To mimic or simulate,
A multiverse machine, the name of the game, bring it on.
 
vii.)
 
Time real, Newton and Einstein
out of sync, motion observed from a position of rest.
 
viii.)
 
Onto an indeterminate future,
Consciousness, particle physics, the genome and time real.
 
ix.)
 
End game is the name of the game,
space quartered in the loop of quantum gravity.
 
x.)
 
Time real,
at my window with a broken wing.
 

 

Robin
Edited by Robin Ouzman Hislop


Robin Ouzman Hislop Editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal
Poetry Life & Times. (See also its Wikipedia entry at Poetry Life and Times). He has made many appearances over the last years in the quarterly journals Canadian Zen Haiku, including In the Spotlight Winter 2010 & Sonnetto Poesia. Previously published in international magazines, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina, Post Hoc installed at Bank Street Arts Centre, Sheffield (UK), Uroborus Journal, 2011-2012 (Sheffield, UK), The Poetic Bond II & 111, available at The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes a recently published Anthology of Sonnets: Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. He has recently completed a volume of poetry, The World at Large, for future publication. He is currently resident in Spain engaged in poetry translation projects.
 
 
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John O’Donohue Celtic Poet Anam Cara

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John O’Donohue, Ph.D., was born in County Clare in 1956. He spoke Irish as his native language and lived in a remote cottage in the west of Ireland until his untimely death in January 2008. A highly respected poet and philosopher, he lectured throughout Europe and America and wrote a number of popular books, including Anam Cara and To Bless the Space Between Us.

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Derek Walcott.Poet of Oceanic Scales & Large Canvases.

Derek Walcott
 
 
Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners.
 
Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism and post-colonialism.
 
His recent collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (edited by Edward Baugh, 2007) and White Egrets (2010). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee depicted his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”
 
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Walcott’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is Professor of Poetry at Essex University.
 


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