Paul Celan



Conjuring Merlín with an ‘í’: Shannon Maguire Interviews Erín Moure

Erín Moure is an internationally recognised, award-winning, poet and translator.

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Letter to Anne Carson: Work of Remembrance and Mourning

‘I came to think of translating,’ you write in Nox ‘… as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch.’ I read your words and imagine you standing in a dark room, your hand thrust forward for a handshake with Catullus’s Poem 101.

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Sublime Necrophilia or Ceasing To Exist in Order to Be : On Translating Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season that Does Not Exist in the World

Like the male dusky antechinus, an Australian marsupial, translation has an unusually long mating period. For 14 hours it fucks so vigorously that its stress hormones overload, causing its immune system to collapse. It performs the sexy death. A lethal transfer of life. Or is it a deathy sex?

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‘Transgressive Circulation’: Translation and the Threat of Foreign Influence

At the AWP writers’ conference in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, I attended a panel on Paul Celan’s poetry. In the Q & A that followed the panel, the first question was ‘How can we make sure that young American poets are not improperly influenced by Celan’s poetry without truly understanding it?’ The panel responded by offering a variety of possible solutions, such as reading the extensive literature about the poet or reading his letters and journal entries that have been published as well.

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Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan

In 1966 Prynne emphasised the necessity for poetry to ‘emphatically reclaim the power of knowledge for each and any of us in our common answerability as the creatures of language.’[1. Keston Sutherland, “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak,” Glossator: Theory and Practice of the Commentary, 2 (2010): 115-148, 117.] The ekphrastic, proprioceptive and dedicatory analysis that Prynne demanded of his readers through Kitchen Poems and The White Stone reaches a point of crescendo with Brass in 1971.

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