Now available from Ashgate Publishing…
Still Songs: Music In and Around
the Poetry of Paul Celan
Axel Englund, Stockholm University, Sweden
‘This impressive debut book uses music, both as sound and as idea, to cut through the conventional wisdom
about Paul Celan and to forge a more nuanced, more complex view of Celan’s poetics than the one afforded
by the legends that have accumulated around the poet. Axel Englund shows with meticulous argument and
in lucid prose that Celan’s lifelong return to figures of music forms a key arena for the playing out of his
conflicted identity as a modern poet, and in particular as a poet whose modernity is overdetermined – but
far from exhausted – by his experience as a survivor of the Holocaust.’
– Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, USA
‘Axel Englund’s sophisticated study of Paul Celan combines the insights of a philologist with the keen ear of
a composer-musicologist. It illuminates not only the extraordinary role that music plays in Celan’s conception
of poetry, but also the singular impact his work has had on contemporary classical music. A milestone in
Celan studies.’
– Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University, USA
What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other in the
shadow of the Holocaust, as means of aesthetic self-reflection? How
can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German
Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second
World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund’s book,
which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music.
Contents: Introduction: poetry and music in conflict and
convergence; Play death sweeter: musicality, metaphoricity, murder;
Fire in the harp, in her hair: the lied and the lullaby; Rises and plays:
interruptive repetition and the law of musical purity; Into you, into
you I sing: spasmodic speech and the borders of the human body;
We resound: music in and beyond the first person plural; Shattered
the songs: dissonances of a German-Jewish musicality; Bibliography;
Index.
Includes 2 b&w illustrations and 30 musical examples
Sample pages for published titles are available to view online at: www.ashgate.com
All online orders receive a discount
Alternatively, contact our distributor:
Bookpoint Ltd, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales,
130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1235 827730 Fax: +44 (0)1235 400454
