Description: Rich new translations of one of the most important poets of our time.
Review Quotes:
"In 'Glottal Stop, ' the translators...take greater risks...but the poetic rewards are...at times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound..."--Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review
"If any American poet can render Celan's knotty German into English it's McHugh, who's justly praised for her linguistic facility and quickness. Couple this with Popov's scholarly notes and annotations -- he seems to have tracked down nearly every conceivable reference embedded in these poems -- and the result is a thrilling excursion that gives the lie to the long-standing belief that late Celan is untranslatable."--San Francisco Chronicle
"The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative."--J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
"In 'Glottal Stop, ' the translatorstake greater risksbut the poetic rewards areat times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celan's language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound"--Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review
"Heather McHugh, herself a renowned poet, has an ear for the dense and difficult music of Celan's language, and one can hear overtones of her distinctive voice . . . Nikolai Popov, a Joyce scholar, is present here too, bringing his 'logician's nature' to bear on Celan's labyrinthine philosophical gestures. The tug-of-war between these impulses toward lyric intimacy and analytical distance mirrors the tension between Celan's love of language and his knowledge of its limitations. The result is something like a volume of Heidegger into which someone has slipped a handful of achingly beautiful love letters . . . It is a broken, distinctly human music that Popov and McHugh render in English in Glottal Stop."--Voice Literary Supplement