(P/B) SNOW PART / SCHNEEPART

Παρουσίαση

A few months before his death, Paul Celan described Schneepart as his 'strongest and boldest' book. A response to the turbulent events of 1968 - the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the attempted assassination of a student leader in Berlin - the collection is haunted by images of earlier violence and resistance in a dark European century: the hanging of anti-Hitler conspirators in 1944, the shooting of Rosa Luxembourg in 1919. These are poems of an Ice Age, their terrain the clarity of the limestone alp with its subterranean presence of caves and abysses.
Snow Part is the first translation of Schneepart to be published in English. Its seventy poems were written between December 1967 and October 1968, and published in 1971, a year after Celan's death. To this volume, Ian Fairley adds some twenty posthumously published poems closely linked to Schneepart. (From the publisher)

"SNOW PART, pitched, to the last,
in the updraught, before
for ever unwindowed
huts:

to skite flat dreams
over
fretted ice;

to hew out the word-
shadows, to cord them
round the cramp-iron
in the pit."

Περιεχόμενα

Introduction: Iceland
Snow part
I
Unwashed, unprimed
You lie
Lilac sky
Well-gravers
The breached year
Unreadable
Whorish Then
What knits
I hear the axe has flowered
With a fieldmouse voice
In lizard
Snow part
II
The world to be stammered after
You with the dark sling
Januaried
Foul up
Parcel freight
Put in
Woodenvisaged
Largo
To the order of night
To speak
Something like night
III
Why so all at once at home
Why stand out
Mapesbury Road
The overvaulted call
Adumbrated
To monger
The man of runes
I gave a chance
What the wall says
For Eric
Who breaks no ground?
Leucojums
You cord through
For Eric
Your blond shadow
Abysms prowl
The echo of your mane
IV
The device in your ear
The half-eaten
A leaf
Playtime
The steps climb
Open glottis
To climb
Raised bog
Oreflashes
One-faced
With vinehooks
Loess dolls
V
Steelshot lens-stone
And force and pain
Uplifted
Rockfall
I pace
Flashlights
A reading branch
Tear
Chalk crocus
The cables
In the entry hatches
And now
Quickfire perihelion
We the overdeepened
Behind templesplinters
Umbrage
The darkened
Eternity
Other Poems (1968-1969)
The goat's-leaf bleats
You
Proverb-Deutsch
Port-Bou - deutsch?
Stimulus point
Oldest Red
Gymnosperm
How many
I hear so much of you
You are unending
Into sleep, into the beam
In my shot knee
Standing grief, at no time
Where no light can be shed
Live the lives
You seek asylum
Weighed
Kew Gardens
In receipt / Sold out / Daybreak soon
Biographical Note: Paul Celan