The great Holocaust poet Paul Celan, whose mother and father died in an internment camp, and who himself was imprisoned in a work camp, has written some of the most memorable and mournful poems about death and loss. In these lucid and lyrical translations of Celan’s poetry by Daniel Tobin, we are reminded that for Celan, “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.” This lyrical collection places Celan’s poetry in an interpretive musical arrangement that reverberates with notes of metaphysical longing amidst the speaker’s despair. It is both compelling and haunting, a testimony to the enduring power of language and poetry to confront the unspeakable.

Steven Schneider

As time sweeps inexorably forward from events that occurred in mid-twentieth century Europe that framed Paul Celan’s life and formed his literary vision, new voices of intolerance are raised that target minorities and the vulnerable to remind us, chillingly, of the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family in Romania, Celan lived through the horrors of the period leaving us a poetry of witness: sparse, imagistic, hermetic, luminous.

Daniel Tobin’s new versions of Celan’s poems, while building on the work of others, offer us new and nuanced approaches to the poetry underlined by a finely-tuned sense of tone, diction, syntax, and line. Tobin, as a poet and scholar who has always engaged with issues of faith, doubt, witness, and the presence of the past in the present, is an ideal interpreter of Celan’s vision—his solitary candle as it burns in defiance of power.

In Tobin’s able and reverent hands, Celan’s work is given a new charge for our own times. The Stone in the Air is moving, splendid, and a gifted work of translation.

Eamonn Wall

Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems: Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2011) The Net, the book-length poem, From Nothing, and Blood Labors (Fall 2018), along with the critical studies and Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America: On Irish American Poetry, and On Serious Earth (forthcoming 2019). He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: The Selected Early Poems and Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art, and The Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge. Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

HOMECOMING

Snow falling, dense as some poems, denser,

like yesterday, dove-colored,

snow falling, as though you still were sleeping,

the whole world piled into whiteness.

And beyond the world, endless—

the sleigh print of the desolate.

There, deep down, sheltered under that mountain:

what so harrows the eye—mound

after mound—burgeons upward invisibly.

From each, hammered home into its

own present, a pole, wooden,

an I that sinks away into muteness.

There, shuddered by ice and wind, it moors

itself to the dove-, to the snow-colored

fabric of what it feels, its only flag.

IMAGINE IT

Imagine it:

Masada’s swamp soldier

hauling himself home

ineradicably

against the wire’s every thorn.

Imagine it:

the eyeless, the shapeless

rousing you to freedom

with their furious digging

until you strengthen

and rise.

Imagine it: your

own hand

has held a scrap

of earth,

more habitable, that

suffered upward again

into life.

Imagine it:

this was borne over to me—

a name awake, a hand awake

forever—

from the ones who will never be buried.

PARALLAX

These countless constellations

bestowed to us, to everyone….

I was, when I beheld you—

how long ago?—out in the open

among the protean Otherworlds.

O these passages, galactic,

O this hour whose tipped scale

gravitates to the burden of our names.

It is, I know it, not true that we lived,

a breath wavering blindly between

being there and not there, now and then

our eyes alighting to one frequency,

a comet humming toward extinguished things

in gorges where they would die away

and time stood, voluptuous,

on which all that is or was or will be

had already burgeoned

upwards and downwards and away.

I know, I know and you know, we knew

did we not, we were there, yes,

and sometimes when Nothing

stood between us we found

our way entirely to one another.

ISBN	978-1-910669-69-3
Pub Date	Monday, March 05, 2018
Cover Image	Cover Photography: Christine Casson. Design: Siobhán Hutson
Page Count	62
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The Stone in the Air – A Suite of Forty Poems from the German of Paul Celan / Daniel Tobin

The Stone in the Air – A Suite of Forty Poems from the German of Paul Celan

By: Daniel Tobin

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