"Paul Celan is one of the essential poets--not just of the twentieth century, but of all time. Pierre Joris's selections from the remarkable, heart-shattering work provide what is surely the best one-volume introduction to Celan ever published in English."--Paul Auster "No twentieth-century poet pierces the heart of language with such an exquisite blade as Paul Celan. With Pierre Joris & company's translations of key poems, poetics, letters, and exemplary commentary, it is as if we are reading Celan for the last time, once again."--Charles Bernstein, author of With Strings "Joris has dwelled during the better part of his life in Celan's words and silences and, as his brilliant introduction demonstrates, he has journeyed through the work's intricacies like very few others."--Michael Palmer, author of The Promises of Glass "A beautiful--and necessary--book. Celan's charred radiance shines through every page."--Richard Sieburth, translator of Hymns and Fragments

A Bilingual Edition Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) is celebrated for his late works in German: Breathturn (1967), Threadsuns (1968), and Lightduress (1970, all published by Green Integer). Less known are his writings in Romanian, written before his arrival in Vienna in 1947. The famously melancholic poet characterizes these early years as being touched with euphoria. "Paul Celan… has become the raw material of so much critical processing, it has become difficult to read him without hearing the voices of the commentators. The continual buzzing of the interpretive chorus around Celan’s poetry has nearly added another layer of pain to work that is already written at the synapses of raw nerves. I say 'nearly,' because happily there is Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi, who translate the poetry as if there are only two entities in the room: Psyche and Echo. Celan would have been proud to be thus refreshed." — Poet/critic Andrei Codrescu on Romanian Poems

In the mid-fifties Paul Celan suggested that he had a mind for writing that "would be a bit more sober & more spacious" than his poems. And yet, in his life-time Celan published very little of such "more spacious" work -- i.e. prose -- except for two essays that were public award-acceptance speeches, and a few occasional bits and pieces often published, or better, hidden away in obscure places. It is only with this volume, edited by Barbara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou, that Celan's multifaceted achievements as a prose writer can be discovered. For example, in the early language games of surrealist inspiration. In the biting, bitter aphorisms, "counterlights" thrown on those concrete dates from and toward which his poems are written -- since the early sixties we are dealing with texts that explicitly exhibit their contemporaneity. Or in the poetological critique of the prejudices with which the volumes of his poetry were read. Among the most surprising and appealing of these prose writings are the narratives, the "stories" and dialogues with the background of his Jewish fate. This English version of Microliths follows the first German edition of 2005. The sole difference is in the final section, the commentaries, which is a shortened version of Wiedemann & Badiou's original commentary, with some additional material by Pierre Joris. The translator, who this year concludes a 52-year involvement with bringing Celan's oeuvre into English, & the publisher are honored to release this book -- the only major collection of Paul Celan's prose -- in 2020, his 100th birth- & 50th death-year.