Pierre Joris' Meanderings & mawqifs of poetry, poetics, translations y mas. Travelogue too.
This poem, probably written in or after July 1944, most likely in Czernowitz, today Chernivtsi, after returning from the forced labor-camp he had been interned in. The ms. has his note: “In memory of...
As chance, whatever that is, would have it, after being silenced by yesterday afternoon’s zoom-bombing just as I was about to speak on translating Paul Celan for Princeton, my publisher, FSG, as part of...
As I am in the process of proofing my final Paul Celan volume of translations — Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry — to be published by FSG in early November,...
The great Jewish German-Swedish poet & playwright Nelly Sachs passed on this day, 12 May, 1970. Raised in Germany, the rise of nazism in the thirties terrified her so much that at one point she...
Yesterday I finished reworking my translation of Paul Celan’s poem “Speechgrille |Sprachgitter,” from the eponymous 1959 volume. Let me offer it here on World Poetry Day (as — rare occasion! — a second post...
An excerpt from Microliths They are, Little Stones (the Collected Posthumous Prose) by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris [This is one of Celan’s rare forays into prose/fiction & dates most likely from the early fifties.] ...
Poetry / Translation / Video
by Pierre Joris · Published January 15, 2019 · Last modified January 16, 2019
Her corpse was found only 4 months after her assassination, in the Landwehrkanal in Berlin where her murderers had thrown her on January 15 1919. The place is memorialized by a sculpture (you’ll see...
Over the last two year it has been a great pleasure to work on & off at translating Paul Celan’s unpublished miscellaneous prose works that were gathered some years ago by Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand...
A birthday that happened 125 years ago today… & still I can’t find an English translation that satisfies me completely. Most of them feel more or less flat, with Mandelstam turned into a most salon-fähig lyrical poet...
Criticism / Essays / Translation / Uncategorized
by Pierre Joris · Published November 21, 2015 · Last modified November 20, 2015
from: The White Review: A fascinating reflection on Celan and translation from Yōko Tawada, a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany who writes in both Japanese and German. I missed the piece when it first...
Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946, was raised in Luxembourg. Since age 18, he has moved between Europe, the Maghreb & the US & holds both Luxembourg & American citizenship. He has published over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) & The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). Forthcoming are: Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (Small Orange Import, 2023) & Diwan of Exiles: A Pierre Joris Reader (edited with Ariel Reznikoff, 2024). For a full list see the right column on this blog.
In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris’ work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff & Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).
Other work includes the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta’wil Productions). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, and with Habib. Tengour Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3: The University of California Book of North African Literature.
When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte. A volume of their collaborative work, to be called Domopoetics, will be published in the near future.
More
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader” edited & translated by Pierre Joris
“Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj”
“Paul Celan: The Meridian Final Version”—Drafts—Materials
“Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-Between” edited by Peter Cockelbergh
“The University of California Book of North African Literature”
4×1 : Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey and Habib Tengour
PABLO PICASSO The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems
Poasis (Selected Poems 1986-1999)
Poems for the Millennium 1 & 2
ppppp-Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics by Kurt Schwitters
“Todesguge/Deathfugue”
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)”
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux