Benjamin Hollander (Editor)
Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France.
San Francisco: David Levi Strauss, Editor & Publisher, 1988. Special Double Issue of ACTS: A Journal of New Writing. Acts 8/9, 1988. First edition. 249 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", shows light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright. 
"Paul Celan has been called the most significant literary figure of his generation, his poetry praised as "the only lyric pendant to Kafka's work." A Romanian Jew who survived the Nazi death camps, Celan was an equally brilliant translator of poetry who wrote in German but lived in exile in Paris between 1948 and 1970, spending almost half of his life outside a German-speaking culture. "Certainly,' as Joel Golb writes, "one of the significant factors informing the genius of [Celan's] translations...is [his] acute awareness of having to confront the cultural values of an alien milieu -- as if the translations played out a creative encounter not fully possible in the real, phenomenal world..."
"Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France" is the first book-length treatment in English to focus on how Paul Celan offered the act of translation as one paradigm for his encounters with other poets, and how his thinking as a translator influenced his work as a poet. In a broader context, this book provides a rare perspective on the meanings of Celan's life and work in Paris, where a generation of writers has "translated" into its own work the presence of his."