Toby Litt on Celan's Breathturn

Gratifying to read in the Guardian’s Observer‘s “That’s the best thing we’ve read all year” section the following entry:

Toby Litt

In February I finally got hold of Paul Celan’s Breathturn (Green Integer Press) as translated by Pierre Joris. Breathturn is the earliest of Celan’s final three books of poetry. The other two, Threadsuns and Lightduress, had already been published and I had been waiting to complete the trilogy. Although Celan has a reputation for obscurity, I find him more moving than any other 20th-century poet. These editions – with English and German on facing pages – could not be bettered.

Toby Litt is an English writer/novelist born in 1968, the same year I started to translate Breathturn. More on him, here.

Further down the page poet/novelist Iain Sinclair picked poet Ken Edwards’ superb book Unknown Cities:

I welcomed the reissue, with new introductions, of two classics of London lowlife: Night and the City by Gerald Kersh (London Books) and The Gilt Kid by James Curtis (London Books). Exuberant, life-affirming accounts, both, of how the individual is crushed by the gravity of the city. Nostalgia for Unknown Cities by the poet Ken Edwards (Reality Street) is the wild card: hypnagogic derangement as the urban dream dissolves before our eyes