Poems of Paul Celan

First edition thus. 8vo. Pp. 358, [1 (publisher's ads)]. Navy-blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine; stippled brick-red endpapers. Jacket design by Richard Hollis.

Translated, with a Preface and a sixteen-page Introduction, by Michael Hamburger. Enlarged edition with two new translations and numerous corrections to previous versions. Bi-lingual text with German and English on facing pages.

Awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990. Paul Celan is, in George Steiner's words, "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945." Language, Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war – his wartime experiences comprising the recurrent themes of his poetry.

"Celan's mysterious, spell-binding German poems have been translated into equally mysterious, equally spell-binding English verse. Through these exemplary translations the English reader can now enter the hermetic universe of a German-Jewish poet who made out of the anguish of his people... things of terror and beauty." –Times Literary Supplement