ON READING AND TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN with Pierre Joris

Paul Celan has a reputation for being a very difficult or even at times incomprehensible or “hermetic” poet. After a 53-year involvement reading, translating & writing about Celan’s poetry & prose, Pierre Joris would like to address these “difficulties” by guiding participants through an “ABC of Reading” as a way into & through the complexities of Celan’s work. This seminar will examine & compare a range of poems from early and late periods, show the evolution of Celan’s poethics via both the poems themselves & the author’s poetic statements, while using the process of translation as a technique of investigative reading. 

A sample reader of Celan poems & proses, in the original & in translation, with additional commentaries on the texts will be made available to the participants prior to the seminar so as to facilitate involvement & collaborative reflection during the seminar.

Pierre Joris has moved between Europe, the US & North Africa for some 55 years now, publishing over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Fox-trails, -tales & -trots (poems & proses, Black Fountain Press); the translations Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan (FSG) & Microliths: Posthumous Prose of Paul Celan (Contra Mundum Press). In 2020 he  also published A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly (co-edited with Peter Cockelbergh & Joel Newberger, CMP), & earlier: Arabia (not so) Deserta (Essays, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2019), Conversations in the Pyrenees with Adonis (CMP 2018), and The Book of U (poems, with Nicole Peyrafitte, Editions Simoncini 2017). When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte.

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instructions for accessing the Zoom link for the seminar will be sent to registered participants by email.