Hamburger, Michael

Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition

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Classic Collection
Poetry After Auschwitz
With A Variable Key....
The Best Bilingual Edition of Celan Thus Far
What a feat of mutated disbelief it must...

Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition
Paul Celan
Manufacturer: Persea Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Poems And Fragments
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ASIN: 089255276X

Amazon.com

George Steiner has declared, "The quality of aloneness in Celan is pitiless." Paul Celan's hermetic, Holocaust-haunted works call out to us and then resort to difficulty, private language, and--in the late art--splintering and silence. Celan, who committed suicide in 1970, was born in Romania and wrote in a German taut with archetypes, archaisms, and neologisms, which has both frustrated and inspired fellow poets and translators. Michael Hamburger has been more daring than most. Laboring on a dual-language selection, he had to resort to biographical clues to unravel entire poems; he bluntly states that "much of Celan's later poetry can be intuitively grasped, but not rendered in another language, without as much knowledge as possible of his sources.... What makes them difficult is the terrain itself--a terrain in which milk is black, death is the all-encompassing reality--not the nature of its charting."

The reference is to Celan's most famous work, "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a poem which grows more harrowing with each reading, particularly the iconic lines "death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue / he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true." Hamburger's translation begins: <blockquote> Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon and in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there lies one unconfined... </blockquote> Though this is among Celan's more accessible works, most of the poems in Hamburger's volume will reward, and stun, the attentive reader.

Book Description

This peerless edition, first published in 1980, remains the English- language standard for the poetry of Paul Celan, the Holocaust's most haunting, and haunted, voice.

Customer Reviews:

Classic Collection.......2007-05-07

This excellent edition of Paul Celan's major poetry (translated excellently by Michael Hamburger) provides the full scope of Celan's considerable genius. Included is the famous 'Death Fugue,' perhaps the most darkly beautiful and profound works of art about the Holocaust yet created. One is left with Celan's transitions; he began immersed in the syle of early 20th century German poets suck as Rilke, and later progressed in Breathturn and Threadsuns to reveal his capacity for highly creative and original linguistic play. The final poems are characterized by a deep morbidity and anguish; they are patently indicative of the poet's distrught spirits. He would later kill himself by drowning.

Celan is now written about intensively by the philosophers Derrida and Lyotard, he is probably as important to them as Holderlin was to Heidegger. The editor has included a poem that Celan did not intend for publication; but you can understand why it was included, as it is a magnificent triumph of expressive sorrow over the loss of his parents during the war. Celan was a very great poet, readers are still trying to catch up with his complexity and deep artistic insight.

Poetry After Auschwitz.......2006-08-23

Adorno was wrong. There is poetry after Auschwitz, and this is what it looks like. Celan's short poems are compressed visions of horror. He tears at the fabric of language in order to render the torn fabric of reality. Reading Celan, I think of the best paintings by the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer, an artist who, like Celan, attacks his materials with fire, sometimes even burning gaping holes into his vast canvases. Art after Auschwitz must be prepared to show the damage, the tears in the fabric of what makes us human. Celan--and Kiefer, at his best--points toward a new way to be human. I cannot praise an artist more highly than that.

With A Variable Key...........2003-08-28

I first discovered Celan last November when I read "With A Variable Key" on the web page for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist." Curious, I checked out a book of his works from the university library and was immediately enthralled with Celan's world. I purchased this book soon after.
Celan gives new meaning to the idea of an artist putting his/her life into their work. His tortured existence replays itself over and over in his work and one can almost feel the agony Celan suffered through dealing with and ultimately losing the battle with his demons. Hamburger's introduction to Celan's life and his methods of translation were also insightful and ironic considering German was the language of Celan's own prison.
There is the darkness found in such sweeping works as "Death Fugue" and "Wolfs Bean." Then there is the subtle beauty which I personally find in "How You" and "Not Until." My favorite of his poems has to be "With A Variable Key."
Celan is hailed by some as one of the greatest poets of German literature and the 20th century. Hamburger's collection and translations do Celan's work justice.

The Best Bilingual Edition of Celan Thus Far.......2002-04-20

Poet and translator Michael Hamburger has done us an excellent service by giving us this book, which will certainly become the bilingual edition of choice for Paul Celan. A few words.

On Celan: Probably the second most important German-language poet of the 20th century after Rilke, but very different in style and mindset! Whereas Rilke provides incredible lyricism, Celan's poetry is jerky, raw, cut-off, even tortured. Struggling with how to write poetry in the German language after the Holocaust (Celan was a Jew), he chose to focus on the basics of language - prepositions, pronouns - and place the language under such pressure and in such tension that poetry could again speak. To Adorno's claim that there could be "no poetry after Auschwitz", Celan proved there was a way, but it was a very difficult one. If you have not yet come across Celan, I can heartily recommend him as one of the greats of the 20th century. His most famous poem is "Todesfuge" or "Death Fugue", but his other poems are also excellent. But be forewarned - this is no light verse. You'll get some heavy stuff, but you'll love it.

On Hamburger: he is a good poet in his own right and a wonderful translator, having already provided the best edition of Hoelderlin's poetry. Now that he has turned to Celan, we benefit very much from his efforts. Celan is incredibly difficult to translate, and the translator must make many choices and must try not to destroy the ambiguity in the German by reducing it simplistically into the English. Hamburger does a good job in this - in most cases a better job than Felstiner, who is the other main translator of Celan (and has a different collection). I would recommend Hamburger's translations over Felstiner. In most cases, he retains more, and there are fewer times when you will say "Eh? Why did he do that??" I suppose if you don't speak any German at all, this will make less of a difference, but if you're getting a bilingual edition you probably can at least read a little bit.

Well, a very good book of translations and a fantastic poet. What more could you ask for?

What a feat of mutated disbelief it must..........2000-02-08

...have been for him to come across the words he found growing in himself in the tongue of the enemy:

Schimmelgrün ist das Haus des Vergessens.

Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann.

Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar;

mit schwärender Zehe malt er im Sand deine Braue.

Länger zeichnet er sie als sie war, und das Rot deiner Lippe.

Du füllst hier die Urnen und speisest dein Herz.

------------------------------

Green as mould is the house of oblivion.

Before each of the blowing gates your beheaded minstrel turns blue.

For you he beats his drum made of moss and of harsh pubic hair;

With a festering toe in the sand he traces your eyebrow.

Longer he draws it than ever it was, and the red of your lip.

You fill up the urns here and nourish your heart.

---------------------------

I read these translations side-by-side with the originals, and find them to be about as ept as it gets -- German poetry is clunky enough put into English, but with Celan it gets completely out of hand -- his Deutsch reads like a patois of German and Martian -- twisting the sounds into shapes like a balloon-animal-maker before a birthday party of children, wringing meaning and context and consonance from consonantless animal cries, deep in the night, skinned on frost, in a crater of some prison moon, staring down at the earth very small and far away and jewellike from that distance...

Book Description

This new series brings into modern English a reliable translation of a representative portion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work. This edition, selected from over 140 volumes in German, is the new standard in English, and contains poetry, drama, fiction, memoir, criticism, and scientific writing by the man who is probably the most influential writer in the German language. The executive editors of this collection are Victor Lange of Princeton University, Eric Blackall of Cornell University, and Cyrus Hamlin of Yale University.

Princeton University Press is proud to be the distributor of the twelve volumes in hardcover of the originating publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag. In addition, Princeton will issue paperback reprints of these volumes over the next two years, beginning with volumes one through three.

Goethe, the founder of the poetry of experience, created a body of poetry that is unsurpassed in lucidity of speech and imagery and in instinct for melody and rhythm. Nonetheless, many of his poems are relatively unknown to English-speaking audiences, partly because of the difficulties they have posed to translators. This volume contains translations, side by side with the German originals, of Goethe's major poems--all prepared by eminent American and English writers, and all attesting to his poetic genius.

Goethe's most complex and profound work, Faust was the effort of the great poet's entire lifetime. Written over 60 years, it can be read as a document of Goethe's moral and artistic development. Faust is made available to the English reader in a completely new translation that communicates both its poetic variety and its many levels of tone. The language is present-day English, and Goethe's formal and rhythmic variety is reproduced in all its richness.

The reflections on art and literature that Goethe produced throughout his life are the premise and corollary of his work as poet, novelist, and man of science. This volume contains such important essays as "On Gothic Architecture," "On the Laocoon Group," and "Shakespeare: A Tribute." Several works in this collection appear for the first time unabridged and in fresh translations.

Customer Reviews:

A wonderful edition.......2000-02-20

Solid translations and, like all the volumes in Princeton's 12-volume Goethe series, the book is attractive with great typography. Much easier on the eyes than the Penguin editions.

This volume is a very accessible way to read Goethe for the first time, as well as revealing a new layer of depth for those who are more familiar with his essays and scientific studies.

Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)
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Fair collection

A nice selection, but go for the complete edition

better to stand alone in a monolingual edition

excellent translations

Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)
Friedrich Holderlin
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences) (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences)

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ASIN: 0140424164

Customer Reviews:

Fair collection.......2006-07-05

I don't have much to say about Holderlin's poetry, which I find a bit stodgy and ungraceful, but I have to say I cannot read it in German, which I believe is a necessary prerequisite to any true read of poetry. I would merely like to share a poem that I found beautiful:

Sunset

Where are you? Dazzled, drunken my soul grows faint
And dark with so much gladness; for even now
I listened while, too rich in golden
Sounds, the enrapturing youth, the sun-god

Intoned his evening hymn on a heavenly lyre;
All round the hills and forests re-echoed it,
Though far from here-to pious nations
Who still revere him-by now he's journeyed.

Wo bist du? Trunken dammert die Seele mir
Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ist's,
Dass ich gelauscht, wie, goldner Tone
Voll der entzukende Sonnenjungling

Sein Abendlied af himmlischer Leyer speilt';
Es tonten rings die Walder und Hugel nach.
Doch fern ist er zu frommen Volkern,
Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegangen. (pp 16).

Enjoy the archaic read.

A nice selection, but go for the complete edition.......2004-10-11

This Penguin selection of Michael Hamburger's outstanding Holderlin translations is drawn from his 800+ page bilingual edition of Holderlin called "Poems and Fragments," published by Anvil Press (search for ISBN 0856463604).

If you love Holderlin, the complete 4th edition of "Poems and Fragments" is well worth the modest extra cost--it's a very hefty, very handsomely produced book, and of course it's the definitive Holderlin in English.

better to stand alone in a monolingual edition.......2004-05-02

The translations produced by Mr. Hamburger, himself a poet, reads very well indeed. But should they be used in such bilingual edition as this one, being not very literal?

In 'Dichterberuf'('The Poet's Vocation'), the 12th stanza reads:'Zu lang ist Gottliche dienstbar schon/ Und alle Himmelskrafte verscherzt, verbracht/ Die Gutigen, zur Lust, danklos, ein/ Schlaues Geschlecht und zu kennen wahnt es,' and the translation:'Too long now things divine have been cheaply used/ And all the powers of heaven, the kindly, spent/ In trifling waste by cold and cunning/ Men without thanks, who when he, the Hightest,'. We can see that the translator use the alliteration of 'cold' and 'cunning'(only 'Schlaues' in the original) to compensate that of 'verscherzt' and 'verbracht' (only 'spent' in the translation). We can understand why the previous reviewer says the translations are often surprising(and why I says they are not very literal).

excellent translations.......1999-04-12

As a german reader I must say that the author had made excellent translations. You have the feeling that he translated with heart - very rich in his speech and sometimes surprising. Some verses of Hoelderlin, which are strange and not easy to understand are in his translations clearer and simpler to understand. " But it is the sea / That takes and gives remembrance, / And love no less keeps eyes attentively fixed, / But what is lasting the poets provide" (Remembrance).

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One of the first modern poets
Evocative

Twenty Prose Poems
Charles Baudelaire
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

From the introduction by Michael Hamburger:

"Baudelaire's prose poems were written at long intervals during the last twelve or thirteen years of his life. The prose poem was a medium much suited to his habits and character. Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty. His thinking about society and politics, as about everything else, was experimental; like the thinking of most poets it drew on experience and imagination, rather than on facts and general arguments. That is another reason why the prose poem proved a medium so congenial to Baudelaire."

Customer Reviews:

One of the first modern poets.......2001-02-01

Modernity is what defines the work of Baudelaire. No elegant poems of love; no countryside-dreaming; no evocation of the Classics nor references to the past. On the contrary: urban life; the alienation brought aboout by capitalism; the angst of poor urban dwellers; alcohol and drugs. Poetry is no more just the search for beauty through words. Now, it is a vehicle for the expression of the individual. Content is more important than form, and therefore Baudelaire gets rid of the constraints imposed by verse, even free verse, and lets his soul spill out in a not lyrical, but dark manner.

Evocative.......2000-03-28

These prose poems were my first experience with Baudelaire. I didn't know what to expect, but they're pretty good. They are often vague, but even then manage to be evocative. I'll admit I also bought the book to help my French along (as it is bilingual), but it's Baudelaire and it's good and sometimes thought-provoking reading. Enivrez-vous! De vin, de poesie, de vertu, a votre guise. Enjoy.

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Hamburger's translations of Holderlin are essential

Poems And Fragments
Friedrich Holderlin
Manufacturer: Anvil Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (Studies in Continental Thought)

ASIN: 0856463604

Book Description

"Many have tried their hand at rendering Holderlin in English . . . But no one has done the job better than Michael Hamburger: either with deeper involvement with the scholarship or with clearer ability to bring Holderlin to life."-Emery E. George, University of Michigan

This fourth bilingual edition, incorporating revisions, new translations and other supplementary material, is the classic English edition of Holderlin's poetry for our age.

Customer Reviews:

Hamburger's translations of Holderlin are essential.......2004-10-11

Many might be familiar with Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin from the volume in the Penguin Classics series. Well, those poems were selected from this edition, which is truly and rightfully the mother lode of Holderlin verse in English. If you've also read selections of Holderlin translated by Richard Sieburth (in Princeton's Lockert Library series [ISBN 0691014124]), David Constantine [ISBN 1852243783], or Christopher Middleton (in a volume published by Chicago UP [ISBN 0226349349], later excerpted in the Holderlin volume in the German Library [ISBN 0826403344]), you'll want to supplement your reading with this mammoth, 800+ page, bilingual edition. This newest fourth edition will be Hamburger's last, as he himself states in the Preface, making this volume all the more important and essential as the final version of Holderlin by his one indispensable English translator.

In addition to this volume, I would recommend at least three other volumes of German verse translated by Michael Hamburger, who for the past half-century has been our pre-eminent translator of high German poetry:

Celan (ISBN 089255276X)
Rilke (ISBN 0856463531)
Goethe (ISBN 0856462748)

The Goethe volume in particular, titled "Roman Elegies and Other Poems," published by Anvil Press like this Holderlin volume, is a treasurable piece of work and makes the ideal introduction to Goethe's poetry--better even than the volume of Goethe's poetry in Princeton's 12-volume set of his collected works (to which, by the way, Michael Hamburger has contributed many outstanding translations--that set is life-enhancing, to say the least).

So if you care about Holderlin, or German poetry in translation, or major European poetry, Holderlin has come to be recognized as one of the great poets that the West has produced, and you must own this fourth edition of "Poems and Fragments." My own reading of it marked an epoch in my literary life--the poetry ***found*** me and spoke to me directly, on the deepest level. Much of the poetry describing Holderlin's youth has impressed me as deeply as Wordsworth's 1799, two-part version of "The Prelude"--a text that in my personal canon I consider sacred.

"To be alone
and without gods is death."

--Holderlin, "Poems and Fragments," p. 381

Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays (Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol. 7)

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Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays (Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol. 7)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe , Cyrus Hamlin , and Michael Hamburger
Manufacturer: Princeton Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 3518025643

Book Description

Goethe's early plays bear witness to his urgent desire to enliven German theater-an ambition that followed him to the National Theater in Weimar, where he was named director in the early 1790s. This volume contains eight of these plays, written between 1771 and 1787. Not only do they demonstrate Goethe's unprecedented versatility in experimenting with new forms of dramatic expression, but they also give insight into his development from Sturm und Drang to classicism. These works include prose plays (Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand and Egmont), tragedies and comedies (Clavigo, Stella, and Brother and Sister), and dramatic verse forms (Prometheus, Jery and Betty, and Proserpina).

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WG Sebald in the Guise of a Poet
Like an unknown trunk with a stranger's garments in it

Unrecounted
W.G. Sebald
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Austerlitz

ASIN: 0141018380

Book Description

A keepsake of one of the greatest writers of our time, Unrecounted comes as an unexpected gift to all the readers who loved W.G. Sebald.

W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp were friends from their schooldays. Unrecounted combines 33 of what W.G. Sebald called his "micro-poems"—miniatures as unclassifiable as all his works—with 33 lithographs by the acclaimed artist Jan Peter Tripp. The art and the poems do not explain one another, but rather engage in a kind of dialog. "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp," Sebald comments in his essay, "the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak." The lithographs portray with stunning exactness pairs of eyes: among them the eyes of Beckett, Borges, Proust, Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon, Tripp, Sebald, Sebald's dog Morris. The poems are anti-narrative, epiphanic and brief as haiku. What the author calls "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death" here find a small home.

Customer Reviews:

WG Sebald in the Guise of a Poet.......2005-09-16

UNRECOUNTED is a collaborative work by the deceased and sorely missed WG Sebald and his life long artist friend Jan Peter Tripp. Together they blocked 33 poems and 33 lithographs on apposing pages that were meant to create a sense of communication. In Sebald's words "The longer I look at the pictures of Jan Peter Tripp, the better I understand that behind the illusions of the surface, a dread-inspiring depth is concealed. It is the metaphysical lining of reality, so to speak."

As a devoted reader of all of Sebald's output I was eagerly looking forward to yet another posthumous document from this astonishingly fine writer. What is in this handsome volume is not really 'poetry' but rather brief haiku-like musings. Not that they aren't lovely, it is just that they are not up to the challenging standards of his novels. Still one is left with a satisfied feeling having read this (sideways printed) book of thoughts. The art of Tripp is stunning - eyes of famous writers and thinkers. In the end, in Sebald's own critical self examination, these works are "time lost, the pain of remembering, and the figure of death". As such, they gain more meaning. Grady Harp, September 05

Like an unknown trunk with a stranger's garments in it.......2005-06-02

My first thought was that Sebald (1944-2001) might have been a great novelist but he wasn't too good as a poet. And my second thought was that the good people at New Directions are really milking his posthumous fame to try to sell this puzzling "keepsake," as they call it, for $22.95, when it is so manifestly inferior to his other books. But luckily I kept the book on top of my desk for awhile and presently found myself returning to it again and again, trying to puzzle out what made it different than other books of poetry I had read. These "micropoems," as the translator calls them, do creep under your skin.

Here's one:

The house

in the night
through the windows
the flickering light of
flames

That's it! As New Directions lays them out, these lines are all centered a la Michael McClure (it's hard to tell if Sebald planned this effect.) By the way the translator (Michael Hamburger) must be British and I wonder what a good US translator could have done with the German of these poems which the editor has supplied as an appendix for our eluctation at the back of the book. They are so short you could copy them all out on your lunch hour, but they gain weight and resonance by their placement next to the lithographs that inspired them-33 portraits by Sebald's best friend Jan-Peter Tripp) of people's eyes. (A lot of the poetry is about questions of seeing, perception, realization, etc) I thought I recognized some of the faces and I was right in one case only. The eyes are mostly those of famous artists (Francis Bacon, rembrandt, Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman) and writers (Capote, Borges, Burroughs) and some of the juxtapositions attain a transparency as luminous as ice water. But you don't find out whose eyes they are until the end, so the volume has the aspect of a parlor game to it. By the way, check out page 74. It says those are the eyes of Proust, but they look like Rex Harrison to me!

So you're reading these haiku and puzzling over whose eyes are whose and before you know it, you are swept away into the land of the Unerzahlt for the ride of a lifetime.

The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modernist Poetry Since Baudelaire

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Indispensable study of modern poetry

The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modernist Poetry Since Baudelaire
Michael Hamburger
Manufacturer: Anvil Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0856462756

Customer Reviews:

Indispensable study of modern poetry.......2003-09-27

Michael Hamburger is one of those academic writers you just want to call up and thank. He seems to delight in making complex concepts plain, but without dumbing them down. Anyone who finds twentieth-century poetry "difficult" or irritating or considers it grossly inferior to the lyrical work that came before it should read this book. Hamburger narrates the century-long story of poetry wrestling with itself as it tries to find new ways to make meaning, and confronts (or evades) the political, philosophical and psychological developments of modern life. His observations on the use of "personae" and the problematic distinction between public and private poetry are particularly valuable, as is the breadth of this study which isn't limited to poetry written in English. Unlike so many academics, Hamburger recongnises that plenty of the works influencing a poet's practice were not even written in the same language (think of the French Symbolists' influence - it even got as far as Australia). Hamburger seems to be an ardent modernist, but he doesn't let his enthusiasm blind him to modernism's failings and contradictions - indeed, they're some of things that make it so interesting. His analysis of the work of several canonical modern poets is refreshingly evenhanded. His insightful exploration of Pound and Eliot is superb, particularly the way in which he relates Eliot's poetry to his philosophy and criticism. Those crouched at Eliot's feet might do well to look up for five minutes and read it.

German Poetry from 1750 to 1900 (German Library)

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German Poetry from 1750 to 1900 (German Library)

Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

This anthology of German verse in English translation covers a period that includes perhaps two-thirds of the superlative poets of the German language. Here are 147 poems representing 27 poets from Matthias Claudius to Friedrich Nietzsche. The selection is representative, including both the universally known (Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin) and the less familiar (Brentano, Droste-Hulshoff, Holty, Hebbel, Storm). Among the translations are classics by Coleridge, Longfellow, and the Irish poet James Mangan.

O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli

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The great pain written about in a delicate and subtle way

O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli
Nelly Sachs
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Customer Reviews:

The great pain written about in a delicate and subtle way.......2005-01-16

Nelly Sachs writes about the most painful subject the losses of the Shoah in a delicate and subtle way. She does not have the kind of complexity or dimension of her co- Nobel Prize winner Agnon, but she has a voice and a language truly her own.

Authors:

Authors

Authors