قصة الكتاب :
Paul Celan was born in 1920 to a German-speaking Jewish family. His hometown was Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania that was destroyed by the Nazis. Celan spent his life in France and was heavily influenced by the French poets but wrote his poetry in German. He was well-versed in at least six languages and often worked as a translator for other poets. As a German-speaking Jewish World War II survivor who lived in France, Celan often felt an estrangement from his native language. He tried to deal with this by unknowingly creating his own unique version of the language and dismantling it emotionally, thereby lending it a touch of vagueness and gloom. Celan lost his parents in the war, and his experiences of the war years and the pain of losing his parents are recurring themes in his poetry. He is regarded as one of the most important German language poets of the century.

\r\nIn his own words, language was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. Everything else that he knew as familiar had been destroyed and his memories fractured. He explained that his language too underwent the same struggles he did, bore the painful silences, the darknesses of murderous speech emerging unscathed and enriched by the end of it all. It is his trauma and pain that made its way into his signature poetry. Ultimately, they led to his own death by suicide in 1970. Celan often spoke of a language ‘north of the future’ and compared his poems to messages in bottles that may never be opened. He is best known for his poem Todesfugue (Death Fugue or Death March) which was a work of great complexity and power. For Celan, writing in German was his way of making a connection with his own memories of his mother, who had taught him the language. His deconstruction of the language, as was the view of certain people who read his work at the time, was in his eyes the only way to describe what had happened after the terrible times were over. He is quoted as saying that there weren’t enough right words and phrases in the language that existed to describe the horrors that everyone endured. Some of his other famous poems include Fadensonnen, Lichtzwang and Wolfsbohne.

\r\n\r\nMichael Hamburger is known as one of the best translators of German poetry to English. He knew Paul Celan personally and spent a great deal of effort translating Celan’s work and making it more accessible to readers worldwide. He received the Goethe Medal of the German Federal Republic and won the European Community\'s European Translation Prize for this book.\r\n