What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a 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. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary discussion on the relationship between the vocal and the instrumental in music and other arts and in everyday communication alike. Presenting an in-depth systematical and historical analysis of the evolution of word and gesture art, it gives extensive information on the anthropological, biological, and physiological influences and interactions in music and beyond. The book gives a unique definition of the genuinely vocal and instrumental from their generative deep structure: They derive from and are determined in their production by the duality of voice and hands, and in terms of product as the tone or ‘tonal’ on the one hand, and the percussive, that is noise plus rhythm, on the other. This book succeeds in bringing together perspectives from art, and from natural and social sciences, merging them to offer new explanations about the relationship between the vocal and instrumental, and eventually about the origins of music, arts, and language. It offers new perspectives on the intertwining between the vocal and the instrumental, specifically in the context of the expressions of human languages. At the same time, this book aims at clarifying and explaining the role of words and gestures in different contexts, such as society and communication, education, and arts.

Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celan's oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called "perfect in language, music, and spirit" by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celan's work--his dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay.

This is a new, revised edition of an Anvil Classic. Paul Celan was one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Born into a Jewish family in a German enclave of Romania, his life and work were indelibly marked by the Holocaust: his parents perished in a camp, he was lucky to survive. The Jewish experience and the force of history stretched language, and Celan himself, beyond breaking point. Celan committed suicide in Paris in 1970, but not before he had remade and reclaimed German as a language fit for poets. Celan spoke of a language 'north of the future' and described his poems as messages in bottles that might never be received.

Presents a selection of the poems of Paul Celan translated into English, with the original German on facing pages, that includes a substantial essay by the translator on translating Celan's poetry.

The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to René Char and Jean-Paul Sartre—all appearing here for the first time in English.

Marking Paul Celan's 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his death, this volume endeavours to answer the following question: why does Celan still matter today – more than ever perhaps? And why should he continue to matter tomorrow? In other words, the volume explores and assesses the enduring significance of Celan's life and œuvre in and for the 21st century. Boasting cutting-edge research by international scholars together with original contributions by contemporary artists and writers, this book attests to, on the one hand, the extent to which large swathes of contemporary philosophy, poetics, literary scholarship, and aesthetics have been indebted to Celan's legacy and are simply unthinkable without it, and, on the other hand, to the malleability, adaptability, breadth and depth of Celan's poetics, which, like the music of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Queen, is reborn and rediscovered with every new generation.