Paul Celan

Paul Celan
English mimics a silence …

Translated by Benjamin Friedlander; each copy is illustrated with 3 unique botanical prints by Grace T. Gomez.

Benjamin Friedlander has published numerous poetry collections, most recently Some Cares. He is the editor of the Selected Poems of Robert Creeley and Larry Eigner’s Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989, as well as co-editor with Donald Allen of the Collected Prose of Charles Olson.

His translations of Paul Celan span decades and were the occasion of many discussions about language with his father, Henry, a Holocaust survivor and scholar.

Grace T. Gomez studied painting at the University of California and at the Accademia in Venice. Her work is in private collections in New York and Italy. She works in many media including photography. Arguably the first artist’s book was produced in 1843 when Anna Atkins made cyanotypes of botanical specimens. These nature prints by Grace Gomez were made with locally sourced plant matter (including ginkgo and eucalyptus leaves, red onion, purple carrot and maple leaves); after printing they have been augmented with metallic paints.

Paul Celan (1920–70) is regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has gained an immortal place in the literary pantheon. Celan’s poetry, with its many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.

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