Fathomsuns and Benighted

Published in 1968 in German, Fadensonnen (Fathomsuns) is Paul Celan's sixth and most extensive collection of verse, presenting 105 poems. Written between 1965 and 1967, they comprised the last major sequence released in the poet's lifetime. Benighted (Eingedunkelt), a sequence of 11 poems, appeared in an anthology of "abandoned works" by Celan and other authors. In these late works, Celan practices the most complex and aggravated syntax and meaning: here his poetry shows Celan turning against his own lyrical powers. Paul Celan is the greatest German-language poet after Rilke. His intolerable wrestle with words and meanings evolved an unequalled insight and originality. He dominates European poetry in the last half of the 20th century by means of his attempt to redeem the human tongue from its terrible history in the post- Holocaust Europe.

Ian Fairley's accomplished translations of the two last collections . . . widens the readership of this necessary poet.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian-born German language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitz, in the then Kingdom of Romania (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine), and adopted the pseudonym "Paul Celan." He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.