Translated by the prizewinning translator Pierre Joris, this bilingual edition follows the publication of Breathturn into Timestead, Paul Celan’s collected later poetry. Finally, Celan’s readers are able to read his work in full, with a new introduction and expert commentary from Joris. Celan, a Romanian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, displays his sharp ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies.

The work, however, is not only reflective: there is in Celan a profound need and desire to create a new, inhabitable world and a new language for it. In Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, the reader witnesses Celan’s poems, which start lush with surrealistic imagery and become pared down, with the syntax growing tighter and his trademark neologisms and word-creations increasing. The four volumes in this edition show the flowering of one of the major literary figures of the last century.

This volume includes Sprachgitter, Die Niemandsrose, Mohn und Gedachtnis, and Von schwelle zu Schwelle.