Celan Studies

The book’s three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poems. The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 105 investigates a historical turn from a poetry that claims to present its object to a poetry that only promises to do so. Reading ‘Engfuhrung’ follows the movement of poetic language into territory undisclosed to epistemic reason. Eden addresses Du liegst, a poem on the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; Szondi actually was with Celan when the poem was written. It analyzes the relation between the historical facts to which a poem refers and its composition. The book contains, as appendixes, Szondi’s notes for three more projected studies of Celan poems, left unwritten at the time of his death in 1971.