{"id":469,"date":"2007-11-25T07:52:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-25T15:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=469"},"modified":"2007-11-25T07:52:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-25T15:52:00","slug":"toby-litt-on-celans-breathturn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/toby-litt-on-celans-breathturn\/","title":{"rendered":"Toby Litt on Celan&#039;s Breathturn"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align: justify;\">Gratifying to read in the <a href=\"http:\/\/observer.guardian.co.uk\/review\/story\/0,,2216448,00.html\">Guardian\u2019s Observer<\/a>\u2018s \u201cThat\u2019s the best thing we\u2019ve read all year\u201d section the following entry:<br \/><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Toby Litt<\/span><\/p>\n<p>In February I finally got hold of Paul Celan\u2019s Breathturn (Green Integer Press) as translated by Pierre Joris. Breathturn is the earliest of Celan\u2019s 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 \u2013 with English and German on facing pages \u2013 could not be bettered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Toby Litt is an English writer\/novelist born in 1968, the same year I started to translate <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Breathturn<\/span>. More on him, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contemporarywriters.com\/authors\/?p=auth243\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Further down the page poet\/novelist Iain Sinclair picked poet Ken Edwards\u2019 superb book <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Unknown Cities<\/span>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gratifying to read in the Guardian\u2019s Observer\u2018s \u201cThat\u2019s the best thing we\u2019ve read all year\u201d section the following entry: Toby Litt In February I finally got hold of Paul Celan\u2019s Breathturn (Green Integer Press)&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paul-celan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}