The Other Voice: Translations from the Übertragungen of Paul Celan
Courtesy of Marquand Books
The Other Voice: Translations from the Übertragungen of Paul Celan by Holly Cundiff, published by Marquand Books ($34.95, 92 pages). Born in Romania into a German-speaking family, Paul Celan (1920–1970) is acknowledged as one of the most important postwar poets writing in German, having achieved critical acclaim for the enigmatic power of his verse. He is also recognized for his meticulous translations into German of a wide range of works written in Romanian, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English by such luminaries as Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Osip Mandelstam, Arthur Rimbaud, William Shakespeare, and Giuseppe Ungaretti, among many others (all those aforementioned names have works featured in Cundiff's new book).
Inspired by the close relation between Celan’s work as Überträger, or “transmitter,” and his own poetry, Holly Cundiff has taken a choice selection of these masterful translations and retranslated them into English to illuminate the magical interstices in which we catch a glimpse of Celan’s own perspective in what one scholar described as his “dismantling and rewelding” of German. Each selection in The Other Voice is presented in three versions: the poem in its original language, Celan’s translation into German, and Cundiff’s translation into English directly from Celan’s translation. This circular process highlights the generative and transformative force of language, which Celan viewed as a means not only of sculpting the world but also of forming new worlds.
Courtesy of Marquand Books
Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, Romania, in 1920. During World War II, he worked in a forced labor camp for 18 months; his parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp, where both died. Celan lived in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris, where he taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure and earned money as a translator. He published numerous books of poetry during his lifetime and is perhaps best known for his poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”). Celan received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. He died by suicide in Paris in 1970.
Courtesy of Marquand Books
Cundiff's previous publications with Marquand Books include translations of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolir le hasard, with illustrations by Odilon Redon (2018) and L’après-midi d’un faune (2020), with illustrations by Édouard Manet; and a retranslation of Mallarmé’s translation into French of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (2019), with illustrations by Édouard Manet.
For more information about this title and others, please visit Marquand Books’s site here.
