The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990. Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, 'almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.' He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970. This third Anvil edition of Michael Hamburger's selected translations now includes the previously uncollected longer poem "Wolf's Bean", several additional short poems, and the essay "On Translating Celan" in which he discusses the challenges faced over many years in his engagement with Celan's poetry. The first Anvil edition of this book was awarded the EC's inaugural European Translation Prize in 1990.

Author Biography

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924. He came to Britain in 1933, and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He is known both as a distinguished poet and as the outstanding contemporary translator and critic of German literature. He has received many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the first edition of Paul Celan: Poems in 1981 and the German Federal Republic's Goethe Medal in 1986 for his services to German literature. He lives in Suffolk.In addition to his many collections of poetry - five have appeared since his Collected Poems 1941-1994 - he has published several collections of essays, a notable critical study The Truth of Poetry, and an autobiography. Other translations published by Anvil are Goethe: Roman Elegies and other poems; Holderlin: Poems and Fragments; Huchel: The Garden of Theophrastus; and Rilke: Turning-Point (poems 1912-1926).