The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Anna Arno's intelligent and intricate biography tells the tragic story of Paul Celan
Paul Celan
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Culture The 27 Poems You Have To Read For National Poetry Month
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her 1993 essay “Someone is Writing a Poem.” Later, in the same essay, she tried to explain just how: “In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones…
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Culture The Female Nude Is Triter Than Ever — Just Look at Anselm Kiefer
Much of German artist Anselm Kiefer’s work can be captured (to the extent that art can ever be described with total accuracy) in a single word: ruin. Kiefer, born in southwest Germany in 1945 just two months before the end of World War II, has dedicated a large portion of his oeuvre to reckoning with…
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Culture Remembering The Man Who Translated The Holocaust’s Most Haunting Poem
John Felstiner, the distinguished translator and literary scholar who brought Paul Celan into English and who also translated Pablo Neruda, will be remembered at a memorial at Stanford University today. Felstiner taught at Stanford for nearly fifty years, in English, Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the author of an essential biography of Celan,…
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Culture In These Dark Times, Turn To Paul Celan
In a time in which the world is increasingly dangerous, cruel, alienating, and above all, incomprehensible, we might find comfort, or at least kinship, in works of poetry. One such poet, whose inventive use of language is marked by despair and resurrection (as we shall see), seems, to me, particularly worth revisiting. To read Paul…
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Books András Mezei’s Holocaust Poetry for Our Time
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
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The Schmooze National Poetry Month: ‘Jew on Bridge’ by C.K. Williams
This year, the Forward is celebrating National Poetry Month in style. The Arty Semite will be featuring new poetry every weekday, and it is our great pleasure to kick off the series with “Jew on Bridge” by C.K. Williams, an American poet who has been awarded nearly every major poetry prize, including a Pulitzer in…
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The Schmooze Author Imre Kertész Enriches Western Culture
Parkinson’s disease has not deterred the octogenarian Hungarian Jewish Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész from literary productivity. Adding to justly-praised books such as “Fatelessness,” “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” and “Detective Story,” still available from Vintage Books, in October Kertész’s French publisher Les éditions Actes Sud released a new translation of “A Galley Slave’s Diary”…
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