Just stumbled across this most interesting Perloff essay on Celan, in which
Pierre Joris' wonderful translations, among others, get a big elephant
stamp.
Best
A
http://bostonreview.net/BR30.6/perloff.html
Paul Celanıs reception in America has always been connected to his status
as the great Holocaust poet, the poet who showed that, Adornoıs caveat
notwithstanding, it was possible to write poetry, even great poetry
in the German language, after Auschwitz. As ³poet, survivor,
Jew² (the subtitle of John Felstinerıs groundbreaking study of 1995), Celan
became the iconic poet for advanced theory, his elusive lyrics endlessly
mined for their post-Holocaust wisdom by Continental philosophers from
Hans-Georg Gadamer to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The result, ironically, has
been to place Celan in a kind of solitary confinement, a private cell in
which his every ³circumcised word² (Jacques Derridaıs term in his essay
³Shibboleth for Paul Celan²) can be examined for its allegorical weight and
theological import, even as, Pierre Joris suggests in the superb
introduction to his new Selections , its actual poetic forms and choices
are taken for granted. ³Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading
of Celan in our time,² writes Charles Bernstein, ³is that we have venerated
him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place,
but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . a crippling exceptionalism has
made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an
ongoing poetic practice.²
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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