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Breath, Today: Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71

Breath, Today: Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71 Shakespeare at 400 On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Paul Celan was invited to translate twenty of Shakespeare’s sonnets into German. Celan first emerged as an iconic post-Holocaust poet following the enormous popularity of “Todesfugue,” but by 1964, the year of the Shakespeare celebrations, he already had abandoned the accessible musicality of that earlier poem in favor of an interrupted, neologistic poetry marked by difficulty, interruption, and pain. The invitation to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets thus apparently returned Celan to a style of poetry from which he had turned away, a poetry that seemed to him no longer to be a legitimate means of expression in the present. Moreover, the invitation charged Celan not only with translating beautiful love poetry, but also with translating the work of a literary icon, a poet who, thanks to A.W. Schlegel’s translations, had become as much a part of the canon of German letters as Goethe. Celan almost always had been interested in Shakespeare. John Felstiner reports that even as a schoolboy Celan “tried making German versions” of Shakespeare, and in 1941, as Romania fell to the Nazis and the Jews of Czernowitz were forced to live in http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Breath, Today: Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71

GUYER, SARA
Comparative Literature , Volume 57 (4) – Jan 1, 2005
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2005 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-57-4-328
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Abstract

Shakespeare at 400 On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Paul Celan was invited to translate twenty of Shakespeare’s sonnets into German. Celan first emerged as an iconic post-Holocaust poet following the enormous popularity of “Todesfugue,” but by 1964, the year of the Shakespeare celebrations, he already had abandoned the accessible musicality of that earlier poem in favor of an interrupted, neologistic poetry marked by difficulty, interruption, and pain. The invitation to translate Shakespeare’s sonnets thus apparently returned Celan to a style of poetry from which he had turned away, a poetry that seemed to him no longer to be a legitimate means of expression in the present. Moreover, the invitation charged Celan not only with translating beautiful love poetry, but also with translating the work of a literary icon, a poet who, thanks to A.W. Schlegel’s translations, had become as much a part of the canon of German letters as Goethe. Celan almost always had been interested in Shakespeare. John Felstiner reports that even as a schoolboy Celan “tried making German versions” of Shakespeare, and in 1941, as Romania fell to the Nazis and the Jews of Czernowitz were forced to live in

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2005

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