Wellman on Celan/Joris

On his blog “immanent occasions: Mental excursions into poetics and cultural anthropology,” Donald Wellman has started to speak to my Celan translations. Much appreciated! Below the opening para; read the rest here:

In the case of Paul Celan, more so than other poets with the possible exception of Louis Zukofsky, the reader is confronted by the slipperiness and multivalency of individual words. This phenomenon of innovation and concentration, this cast of mind often increases with age. Edward Said wrote a fabulous book on the topic of age and its relation to poetic innovation. A flinty disposition may then engender a hard-edged poetry of inflexible compactness, but yet also a poetry that demolishes borders, fusing memories. One suspects that individual words and phrases come to hold private meanings as well as etymological associations that map the whole of literary history.

[ctd.]

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