Just for something completely different:
I sat down & read Pierre Joris's translation of Lichtswang,
Lightduress, yesterday, & just want to say that it's an amazing work.
As the final part of Joris's trilogy of major Celan books, following
Breathturn and Threadsuns, it assumes a place a past of a major
translation project.
With Celan's facing German versions (which, with their neologisms, etc,
are even more opaque to someone like me who has no German but are still
worth glancing at & sounding a bit), Joris's versions are apt,
beautifully realized, & have as much as I can tell the profound &
obdurate meditative numinous myestery of the packed & compressed
originals.
These poems read well in English, & even as I can't 'understand' them I
do respond. Pierre Joris has caught so much of what has made Celan's
work the concentrate of everything he 'knew.' Of course, given what
Celan did with & to the German language in his greatest poems, it is
even more impossible to translate all that they are, but I'd say Joris
has done as much as can be done, & this little book is (along with its
predecessors) a necessary one.
Get all three, I'd say.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
Words cling to other words
As we have seen, although even these are
Migratory and the forgotten shows through as correction.
This noun has been defunct for centuries.
Ann Lauterbach
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