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"The slimness of the book tells its own story of Celan's love affair with silence . . . [Waldrop's English] has an idiomatic adroitness that catches the pauses and suspensions in Celan's breath [and] directs us to a sense of a more reserved, hidden-hearted poet." —Choice
In The New Yorker, George Steiner referred to Paul Celan's prose as "a handful of speeches and a parable, which are transforming the landscape of poetic theory and the philosophy of language." He was talking about this volume of essays, published letters, responses to questionnaires, speeches, and a parable. The prose of Celan is an "indispensable volume for those who would wish to understand the 20th century."
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Paul Celan was born in Bukowina, Romania, in 1920. His parents died at the hands of the German army in 1942. He escaped, survived a period in a labor camp, and eventually settled in Paris where he taught and wrote. He received the Büchner Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award, before he died by suicide in 1970.
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