{"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&#8217;s Observer<\/a>&#8216;s &#8220;That&#8217;s the best thing we&#8217;ve read all year&#8221; 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&#8217;s Breathturn (Green Integer Press) as translated by Pierre Joris. Breathturn is the earliest of Celan&#8217;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 &#8211; with English and German on facing pages &#8211; 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&#8217; 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&#8217;s Observer&#8216;s &#8220;That&#8217;s the best thing we&#8217;ve read all year&#8221; section the following entry: Toby Litt In February I finally got hold of Paul Celan&#8217;s 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}]}}