Our talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has foundered on the forehead of a drowned man.

from 'Backlight'

Paul Celan is recognised as one of the greatest German-language poets since Rilke, and also a poet whose increasingly 'intolerable wrestle with words and meanings' in German produced a powerful, inimitable originality. He wrote formal prose reluctantly, and this volume, published in paperback for the first time, includes the sparse, illuminating writings on poetry and art and the aphorisms which contribute to our sense of the poet and his vocation.
Celan is the most studied post-War European poet. His figure dominates poetry in the aftermath of the Holocaust, at once demanding and highly rewarding. The prose pieces collected here - including 'Conversation in the Mountains' and the invaluable Büchner Prize Speech 'The Meridian' - define a radical, deeply felt poetic response to the horrors of the recent past. Celan's voice cannot but be overheard, even when he speaks most quietly, in the debates about the legitimacy of poetry in the modern world.

ROSMARIE WALDROP is a respected translator of European literature into English. Her work on poetry in general and on Celan in particular has been seminal.