Author: Paul Celan File Type: epub Paul Celan s widely recognized as the greatest and most studied post-war European poet. At once demanding and highly rewarding, his poetry dominates the field in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This selection of poems, now available in paper for the first time, is comprised of previously untranslated work, opening facets of Celans oeuvre never before available to readers of English. These translations, called perfect in language, music, and spirit by Yehuda Amichai, work from the implied premise of what has been called Intention auf die Sprache, delivering the spirit of Celans workhis dense multilingual resonances, his brutal broken music, syntactic ruptures and dizzying wordplay. **From Publishers Weekly Though fluent in a number of languages, Celan (1920-1970), who had come to Paris from Romanian Bukovina, pointedly wrote in German after WWII. His decomposition and recasting of that language, through a style that can seem dizzying in its complex poly-referentiality, was compounded by his erudition, by his own history as a Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in the camps, and finally by his suicide. For many, he one of the major poets of the 20th century. Though Celans work presents obvious difficulties for any translator, his English-language readers have long been well-served by Michael Hamburgers starkly graceful selected translations (Poems of Paul Celan, Persea), which remain the best available, and more recently, by Pierre Joriss acute renderings of Celans later work. Of the new collections here, the volume from Celan biographer and critic Felstiner is easily the most comprehensive, containing ample cullings from all of Celans books, including many poems not included in Hamburgers selection, along with previously untranslated early and late work and four prose pieces. Felstiner handles these translations competently, rendering Celan in a somewhat more colloquial style than Hamburger or Joris. But his shifting diction (including Thou) and his tendency to capitalize nouns and to let German words stand untranslated in the English text can make for a distracting admixture, as it does in Celans much-anthologized early work, Deathfugue Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland. On the whole, Felstiners efforts often pale beside those of Hamburger and Joris, but the page count of this dual-language collection will make it the default choice of those who will buy only one Celan volume. Popov and McHughs collection also ranges over Celans oeuvre, but far less comprehensively or successfully. Unlike Felstiner and Joris, Popov (The Russian People Speak Democracy at the Crossroads) and poet McHugh (Father of the Predicaments, etc.) dont present the German texts en face, a practice they regard, in their preface, as a potential distraction from the readers experience of their renderings. It would indeed be a distraction, making painfully clear just how far they depart from the originals to arrive at their idiosyncratic versions, which alter Celans precise line and stanza lengths significantly, and forsake Celans vertiginous difficulties for a more simplisticAsometimes macabre or wittyAstyle thats littered with heavy-handed gestures. One poem, for example, contains an ex nihilo insertion gleefully riffing on a German pun, others tip the scales of Celans carefully weighted pronouns into one viewpoint or another. Even when hewing closer to the source text, Popov and McHugh incessantly heighten the poems language, degrading their thorniness with more traditional sentiments. Fortunately, many of the poems translated by Popov and McHugh can be found in Joriss new volume, or in his 1995 rendering of Celans Breathturn, both of which present entire books in razor-sharp, finely nuanced translations. Threadsuns represents the continuation of a marked turn in Celans poeticsAaway from lusher effusions to intensely compressed, increasingly stark investigations of language, history and the poets own capacities. Because much of this later work is serial in nature, Joriss decision to render the books in their entirety is profoundly important, and helps to make them necessary complements to Hamburgers selections. While it may not consistently attain the dazzling heights and depths of Celans finest work in Breathturn and 1963s The No-Ones Rose, Threadsuns contains an abundance of brilliant poems and provides ample evidence for the magnitude of Celans stature in the last century, and in the one to come. (Nov.) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review In Glottal Stop, the translatorstake greater risksbut the poetic rewards areat times breathtaking. One senses the originality of Celans language in an English that is resourceful and adventurous, not strained. Language comes alive on the page as both vision and sound Mark M. Anderson, The New York Times Book Review Heather McHugh, herself a renowned poet, has an ear for the dense and difficult music of Celans language, and one can hear overtones of her distinctive voice . . . Nikolai Popov, a Joyce scholar, is present here too, bringing his logicians nature to bear on Celans labyrinthine philosophical gestures. The tug-of-war between these impulses toward lyric intimacy and analytical distance mirrors the tension between Celans love of language and his knowledge of its limitations. The result is something like a volume of Heidegger into which someone has slipped a handful of achingly beautiful love letters . . . It is a broken, distinctly human music that Popov and McHugh render in English in Glottal Stop. Voice Literary Supplement The solutions that Popov-McHugh find to the problems set by Celan are sometimes dazzlingly creative.J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books If any American poet can render Celans knotty German into English its McHugh, whos justly praised for her linguistic facility and quickness. Couple this with Popovs scholarly notes and annotations -- he seems to have tracked down nearly every conceivable reference embedded in these poems -- and the result is a thrilling excursion that gives the lie to the long-standing belief that late Celan is untranslatable.San Francisco Chroniclehtml

Author: Anna Funder File Type: epub font face=DejaVu Sans, serifspan 14pxAnna Funders penetrating and dispassionate Stasiland really begins with one significant date the year 1989. The Berlin Wall falls and the history of a country that had become a microcosm of the Cold War is changed irrevocably. With the hated symbol of the enforced division between East and West reduced to rubble, the two Germanys--East and West--are able to reunite grey, depressed East Germany becomes a memory.spanfontfont face=DejaVu Sans, serifspan 14pxAfter the initial euphoria, the change was hard for the world to accept, but it was both exhilarating and unsettling for the denizens of the Soviet bloc state, who had lived under the brutal, paranoid regime of the secret police, the dreaded Stasi of the title. For the inhabitants of East Germany, there were some stark statistics one in 50 East Germans had informed on a fellow citizen, and human beings behaved in fashions unthinkable just the space of a wall away.spanfontfont face=DejaVu Sans, serifspan 14pxThe amazing stories that Anna Funder tells in Stasiland bring to life with extraordinary vividness both the dark and the more human sides of life in the former East Germany a young girl who could have started World War III, the man who laid down the line that became the Wall. These and a hundred other tales (from both the recent past and the present, as Berlin still struggles with the legacy of history) make for a highly unusual book, the final effect of which is as life-affirming and positive as the destruction of the Wall must have been for those who watched. --Barry Forshawspanfont

Author: David F. Mullins File Type: pdf This book represents a new direction in the study of religion and marriage by using a postmodern theoretical framework focusing on gendered discourse and culture, to examine the meaning of sacred marriage within social contexts. Drawing upon data from in-depth interviews of couples in long-term, sacred marriages living in the American Midwest, together with an analysis of Christian marriage advice manuals, Sacred Marriage explores how couples use religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures to give their marriages meaning, and how those sacred meanings are used in their daily lives and the spaces that they embody. The study shows how religious and secular beliefs are combined to formulate cultural strategies for approaching the sacralization of marriage, and how religious and nonreligious discourses and cultures are ordered, depending on circumstances and social contexts. This often results in other relationships being subordinated in favour of the sacred bond believed to exist between husband and wife. The book argues that sacred marriage is a malleable concept, as people bend religious culture to form new and altered sacred marriages during emotional extremes. A thoughtful examination of long-term Christian marriages, this volume will appeal to scholars of religion and sociology with interests in marriage and the family. **About the Author David F. Mullins is Professor and Director of the Sociology Program at the University of Saint Francis, USA.

Author: Susan Sontag File Type: epub According to Edgardo Cozarinsky, the Argentine film critic There is something recognizably Scandinavian about Brother Carl un-easy, puzzling exchanges between its characters, with brooding, ever-present nature surrounding them. The interplay of formal speech and plain silence recalls Dreyers Gertrud (rather than Bergmans The Silence and Persona). On closer inspection, though, it is unlike any other Scandinavian film. The miracles, unlike that in Dreyers Ordet, are not real ones. But they are the only kind these characters can afford. Brother Carl is an outsiders commentary, with very personal variations, on those motifs that filmgoers associate with the Scandinavian film tradition. And much of its elusive fascination depends on this flexible distance btween material that may seem familiar and the fresh look that establishes its own perspective.Brother Carl was shot in and around Stockholm in 1970 and had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. It was shows at the San Francisco, Chicago, and London film festivals, and had its U.S. theatrical premiere in 1972. Note This eBook edition does not contain images.