"Poetry in the face of the Holocaust: Celan, Stuzkever, and Others"
Thursday, April 17, 1997
5 PM, Bowl Room, Houston Hall
Dr. John Felstiner
English and Comp Lit, Stanford University
Sponsors: Jewish Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of English, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
For more information, contact jsp-info@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book Paul Celan is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems-including a chapter on Celans famous "Deathfugue" – plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The books also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle.
John Felstiner, who teaches English and Jewish studies at Stanford University, is also the author of Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu and The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature.
"Felstiner has done the impossible integrated Celans life and poetry without stinting either. The full weight and agony of the poets fate as Jew and survivor are captured. Felstiner translated with care and caring the major poems and makes them accessible by a commentary that scrupulously records the occasions to which they are linked and the literary allusions they encode. The scholar becomes a poet writing about the greatest of the post-war German poets." — Geoffrey Hartman
"Felstiners book on Paul Celan is, on every level, superb: it is essential to anyone interested in the work of one of the greatest and most moving Jewish poets of our turbulent time." — Elie Wiesel
"An absolutely essential study of one of the genuinely great, and in so many ways enigmatic, poets of our time, a literary biography in the best sense informative, and penetratingly interpretive." — John Hollander