The astounding creative engagement between Paul Celan and Pierre Joris comes to a close with this magnificent volume. With spectacular commentary to boot. It's a mighty feat for Joris to bring Celan's "thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech" into English, through a comprehensive vision honed through decades of study. Having translated the entirety of Celan's late work, and having those resonances in mind when approaching the earlier volumes, gives Joris the special qualification as the most critically well-equipped major translator of Celan in English. At times, however, the heavily literal approach that Joris takes to Celan actually makes the poet more difficult to understand—an issue more so in "Breathturn into Timestead," occasionally resulting in whimsy strained to the point of clumsiness—than in this volume of earlier poetry, which is less reliant on grammatical wrings and neologisms. In "Memory Rose into Threshold Speech," Celan sounds more sagely, youthful, lyrical. And yet the graveness of Celan's poetic project constrained his lyricism, and so "beauty" in a conventional sense is not to be expected from work that so intensely seeks to recapture the lives claimed by Shoah. A poetic oeuvre which seeks to repossess moments from those lives, to make what is abstract, what presents itself as a statistic of six million, palpable and terrifying. But for gravity to come off as a haunting misspeaking? Any tonal oddities are meant to be remedied by the precision of Celan scholar Barbara Wiedemann's translated commentary, and Joris thoroughly explains any unusual word choices with great erudition. His scholarly powers shine here as they did in the collection, "Breathturn into Timestead." One does, however, question how well a translation can stand independently, if annotations are meant to travel with it like additional pieces of luggage. Additional commentary is nearly inescapable given Celan's heavily allusive and elusive techniques, But could a less literal approach be more faithful to the letter (as Celan imagined the act of translation) than literalism? Celan himself, as a translator, often strayed from being literal. His reworkings of Dickinson are a very interesting example of this—inserting or cutting away words! In Celan's translation of "Let down the bars, O Death!" he takes the last of the subsequent lines,

"The tired flocks come in
Whose bleating ceases to repeat,
Whose wandering is done."

and changes it to "Wer nicht mehr wandert, kommt." ("Who wanders no more, comes.") Any choices made in the spirit of poetic freedom / betrayal of the source could be more effective in American English, but much harder to defend, compared with the rigorous faithfulness to the word that Joris has powerfully and paradigmatically endorsed. But this is not to diminish from Joris's profound accomplishment. Joris's volume is spectacular for a reader no matter their level of experience with the German language. He encourages his readers to think boldly about what is retained, and what is lost in the art of translation.

Above all, this culmination of Pierre Joris's Celan project should serve as a great inspiration to readers, poets, and translators alike. Joris's devotion is moving. He asks more of our attention, in the hopes that we may ask more of ourselves, how we read—and to question more deeply what we pursue in long-term engagements with creative figures (whether or not they be Paul Celan) who beckon to us continually, and unexplainably.

It feels weird to read the Romania-born Celan for the first time at an adult age. because back in school, in my communist childhood we read a lot of poetry, but never the problematic, never the ones who fled. Most of my youth I wasn't even sure how to pronounce his name, French way, German way, Romanian? It's probably French, if you care for such details.

I have to be honest and say that I enjoyed the introduction tremendously, the translator did a great job, it's very informative and helps put the poems in context. As for the poems themselves, as it usually happens with anthologies, I loved some, and others not so much. However, the ones that I felt most attracted to are heartbreaking and passionate, definitely an experience not to be missed.

My thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Celan's poems challenge us to think about uncertainty, about how to grieve, about how to heal, about how to face horror, about how to live and love, about how, in my view, after reading how to face, today within this moment, this deep feeling of powerlessness in the face of surviving and facing the injustice and strife all of which looms large and wide and think and large and larger yet like the first wave in a set of oncoming waves that increase in size but obscured by a thick fog.

A lovely book of poems from one of the most formidable German poets. The translator does such a thorough and lovely job at translating and conveying these poems. Definitely recommend for any poetry lover.