Amy Colin
Paul Celan: Holograms of Darkness.
Indiana University Press, 1991. Jewish Literature and Culture. First printing. 0253313783 xxviii/211 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in light gray cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book displays light shelfwear, with minor foxing to top edge of text block. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Dust jacket exhibits shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"To Amy Colin, the enigmatic poems of Paul Celan resemble "certain mysterious holograms in which strange, disturbing shapes, depths, and colors often shift dramatically with the spectator's angle of view." Celan, one of the greatest poets of the post-Holocaust decades, strove to articulate, in the language of the oppressors of his people, his experience of the Holocaust. In search of an idiom to utter the unspeakable, Celan exploded literary tradition. Out of the residue he created poems that bear his testimony of World War II as an urn bears ashes.
Amy Colin explores Celan's poetic development from his early, seldom-studied German and Romanian texts (1938-1947) to his late work (1960-1970) created in Paris, where he committed suicide in 1970. In revealing the dialogue between Celan's early and late poems, Colin discloses the ways in which his response to the Holocaust fatefully interacts with his changing poetic idiom. Her book sets his early lyrics against the background of his multilingual native traditions, the German, Roumanian, Ukranian, and Yiddish literature of the Bukovina. It uncovers Celan's hitherto unresearched links to such literary movements as Franco-Roumanian Surrealism. Through detailed textual readings of his late, mysterious poems and their yet unpublished versions, Colin shows how Celan's poetry undoes its ties to tradition and unmasks the workings of history within language, thus bearing witness to the Jewish catastrophe."