Glottal stop
ʔ
Image
IPA number	113
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʔ
Unicode (hex)	U+0294
X-SAMPA	?
Kirshenbaum	?
Sound
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The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or ʻokina in Hawaiʻi among those using a preservative pronunciation of that name.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩. It is called the glottal stop because the technical term for the gap between the vocal folds, which is closed up in the production of this sound, is the glottis.

Phonetic and phonological features[link]

Features of the glottal stop:

• Its manner of articulation is stop, or plosive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. (The term plosive contrasts with nasal stops, where the blocked airflow is redirected through the nose.)
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibration of the vocal cords; necessarily so, because the vocal cords are held tightly together, preventing vibration.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Phonology and symbolization of the glottal stop in selected languages[link]

While this segment is not a written^[1] phoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. Standard English inserts a glottal stop before a tautosyllabic voiceless plosive, e.g. sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch.^[2]

In many languages that don't allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up such a hiatus. There are intricate interactions between falling tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as Danish (cf. stød), Chinese and Thai.^{[citation needed]}

In the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with an apostrophe, ⟨’⟩, and this is the source of the IPA character ⟨ʔ⟩. In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, ⟨‘⟩ (called ‘okina in Hawaiian), which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe the Arabic ayin and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal fricative ⟨ʕ⟩. In Malay the glottal stop is represented by the letter ⟨k⟩, in Võro and Maltese by ⟨q⟩.

Other scripts also have letters used for representing the glottal stop, such as the Hebrew letter aleph ⟨א⟩, and the Cyrillic letter palochka ⟨Ӏ⟩ used in several Caucasian languages. In Tundra Nenets it is represented by the letters apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ and double apostrophe ⟨ˮ⟩. In Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or anger, and are represented by the character っ.

In the graphic representation of most Philippine languages, the glottal stop has no consistent symbolization. In most cases, however, a word that begins with a vowel-letter (e.g. Tagalog aso 'dog') is always pronounced with an unrepresented glottal stop before that vowel (as also in Modern German and Hausa). Some orthographies employ a hyphen, instead of the reverse apostrophe, if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word (e.g. Tagalog pag-ibig 'love'). When it occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (if the accent is on the last syllable) or a grave accent (if the accent occurs at the penultimate syllable).

Some Canadian indigenous languages have adopted the phonetic symbol "ʔ" itself as part of their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a pair of uppercase and lowercase characters, Ɂ and ɂ.^[3]

Occurrence[link]

See also[link]

• List of phonetics topics
• Stød in Danish
• Saltillo
• Hamza in Arabic
• T-glottalization in English

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Blevins, Juliette (1994), "The Bimoraic Foot in Rotuman Phonology and Morphology", Oceanic Linguistics 33 (2): 491–516, doi:10.2307/3623138, JSTOR 3623138 
• Clark, John Ellery; Yallop, Colin; Fletcher, Janet (2007), An introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 1-4051-3083-0, 9781405130837, http://books.google.com/books?id=dX5P5mxtYYIC 
• Gussenhoven, Carlos (1992), "Dutch", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 22 (2): 45–47, doi:10.1017/S002510030000459X 
• Ladefoged, Peter (2005), Vowels and Consonants (Second ed.), Blackwell, ISBN 0-631-21411-9 
• Olson, Kenneth; Mielke, Jeff; Sanicas-Daguman, Josephine; Pebley, Carol Jean; Paterson, Hugh J., III (2010), "The phonetic status of the (inter)dental approximant", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40 (2): 199–215, doi:10.1017/S0025100309990296 
• Roach, Peter (2004), "British English: Received Pronunciation", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2): 239–245, doi:10.1017/S0025100304001768 
• Schane, Sanford A (1968), French Phonology and Morphology, Boston, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, ISBN 0-262-19040-0 
• Sivertsen, Eva (1960), Cockney Phonology, Oslo: University of Oslo 
• Thelwall, Robin (1990), "Illustrations of the IPA: Arabic", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 20 (2): 37–41, doi:10.1017/S0025100300004266 
• Thompson, Laurence (1959), "Saigon phonemics", Language 35 (3): 454–476, doi:10.2307/411232, JSTOR 411232 
• Watson, Janet (2002), The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-824137-2 

v t e   International Phonetic Alphabet   IPA topics IPA International Phonetic Association History of the IPA Kiel convention (1989) Journal of the IPA (JIPA) Naming conventions Phonetics Diacritics* Segments Tone letter Place of articulation Manner of articulation Special topics Case variants of IPA letters Extensions to the IPA Obsolete and nonstandard symbols IPA chart for English dialects Encodings SAMPA X-SAMPA Conlang X-SAMPA Kirshenbaum TIPA Phonetic symbols in Unicode WorldBet   Consonants v t e IPA pulmonic consonants chartchart image • audio Place → Labial Coronal Dorsal Radical Glottal ↓ Manner Bila​bial Labio​dental Den​tal Alve​olar Post​alv. Retro​flex Pal​a​tal Ve​lar Uvu​lar Pha​ryn​geal Epi​glot​tal Glot​tal Nasal m̥ m ɱ n̪ n̥ n n̠ ɳ ɲ̥ ɲ ŋ̊ ŋ ɴ Plosive p b p̪ b̪ t̪ d̪ t d ʈ ɖ c ɟ k ɡ q ɢ ʡ ʔ Fricative ɸ β f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ ʂ ʐ ç ʝ x ɣ χ ʁ ħ ʕ ʜ ʢ h ɦ Approximant ʋ ɹ ɻ j ɰ Trill ʙ r ɽ͡r ʀ я * Flap or tap ⱱ̟ ⱱ ɾ ɽ ɢ̆ ʡ̯ Lateral Fric. ɬ ɮ ɭ˔̊ ʎ̥˔ ʟ̝̊ ʟ̝ Lateral Appr. l ɭ ʎ ʟ Lateral flap ɺ ɺ̠ ʎ̯ Non-pulmonic consonants Clicks ʘ ǀ ǃ ǂ ǁ ʘ̃ ʘ̃ˀ ʘ͡q ʘ͡qʼ Implosives ɓ ɗ ʄ ᶑ ɠ ʛ Ejectives pʼ tʼ cʼ ʈʼ kʼ qʼ fʼ θʼ sʼ ɬʼ xʼ χʼ tsʼ tɬʼ cʎ̝̥ʼ tʃʼ ʈʂʼ kxʼ kʟ̝̊ʼ Affricates p̪f b̪v ts dz tʃ dʒ tɕ dʑ ʈʂ ɖʐ tɬ dɮ cç ɟʝ cʎ̥˔ kʟ̝̊ Co-articulated consonants Fricatives ɕ ʑ ɧ Approximants ʍ w ɥ ɫ Stops k͡p ɡ͡b ŋ͡m These tables contain phonetic symbols, which may not display correctly in some browsers. [Help] Where symbols appear in pairs, left—right represent the voiceless—voiced consonants. Shaded areas denote pulmonic articulations judged to be impossible. * Symbol not defined in IPA. Chart image Pulmonics Non-pulmonics Affricates Co-articulated   Vowels Front Near-​front Central Near-​back Back Close •iy •ɨʉ •ɯu •ɪʏ •ɪ̈ʊ̈ •ʊ •eø •ɘɵ •ɤo •e̞ø̞ ə •ɤ̞o̞ •ɛœ •ɜɞ •ʌɔ •æ ɐ •aɶ •ä •ɑɒ Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Vowels: IPA help • chart •  chart with audio • view

Susan Murray BJ is now a strategist at the International Development Research Centre. She was also a political communications director and formerly a Canadian broadcast journalist. She graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Carleton University. Her home community is Ottawa, Ontario.

After a career at CBC, she became communications director for Scott Brison in August 2004. Brison was a cabinet minister in the federal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin.

On January 11, 2006, a microphone caught Murray mumbling "That's Bullshit!" at Brad Lavigne of the NDP on live television after he commented that the Liberals were running on 12 years of broken promises.

References[link]

• "Carleton Grads on the Frontlines". Carleton University. Spring 2002. http://magazine.carleton.ca/2002_Spring/765.htm. Retrieved 2006-11-25. 
• Rana, F. Abbas (23 August 2004). "Harper shakes up inner circle". The Hill Times. http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2004/august/23/rana_2/&c=1. Retrieved 2006-11-25. 

This article about a Canadian journalist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Heather McHugh (born August 20, 1948) is an American poet.^[1]

Life[link]

Heather McHugh, a poet, translator, and educator, was born in San Diego, California, to Canadian parents, John Laurence, a marine biologist, and Eileen Francesca (Smallwood). They raised McHugh in Gloucester Point, Virginia. There, her father directed the marine biological laboratory on the York River. She began writing poetry at age five and claims to have become an expert “eavesdropper” by the age of twelve. At the age of seventeen, she entered Harvard University. Her most notable work was Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, which won the Bingham Poetry Prize of the Boston Book Review and the Pollack-Harvard Review Prize. The New York Times Book Review named this work the Notable Book of the Year.

McHugh was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. She teaches at the University of Washington and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

In 2009, she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" for her work.^[2]

Biography [link]

This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (Consider using more specific cleanup instructions.) Please help improve this section if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (May 2009)

McHugh has published seven books of poetry, one collection of critical essays, and four books of translation. She has received numerous awards and critical recognition in all of these areas, including several Pushcart Prizes. Her poems resist contemporary identity politics. She also rejects categorization as a confessional poet, although she studied with Robert Lowell during the time when that described his work.

Her primary education included parochial school, where she credits Sister Cletus’s emphasis on grammar as an early influence. As a student at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, a teacher advised McHugh against applying to Radcliffe, making her determined to get in. She entered the college at age 16 and graduated with honors, receiving her B.A. from Harvard in 1970. She entered graduate school at the University of Denver in 1970, having already published a poem in The New Yorker. She began teaching in graduate school, was a Fellow at Cummington Community for the Arts in 1970, and received the Academy of American Poets prize in 1972. After earning her M.A. in 1972, McHugh received MacDowell Colony fellowships in 1973, 1974, and 1976. In 1974, she also received her first of three National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry. McHugh was the poet-in-residence at Stephens College in Missouri between 1974 and 1976; she worked as an associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton between 1976 and 1982.

At 29, she completed a manuscript of poems titled Dangers (1976), that was a winner of Houghton Mifflin Co.'s New Poetry Series Competition. McHugh’s first book of poems was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977. After a second National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry in 1981 and a Yaddo Colony fellowship in 1980, her second book, titled "A World of Difference: Poems" (1981), was published by Houghton Mifflin. McHugh was 35. During this time, she was a visiting professor at Warren Wilson College in the M.F.A. Program for Writers in North Carolina between 1980 and 1985; at Columbia University in New York between 1980 and 1981; and at the University of California in Irvine in 1982. During 1987, she was the Holloway Lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley. While the top journals published her poetry, some poems were also anthologized in prestigious collections, and top critics called her observations astute and noteworthy as well as courageous.

That same year World of Difference came out, her first book of translations was published. Her poetry translation of Jean Follain’s French work is titled D'après tout: Poems by Jean Follain (1981) for Lockhart Poetry in Translation. In 1984, she became the Milliman Writer-In-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. The residency was initiated that same year, and McHugh has filled the position since then. During the 1980s, McHugh worked a great deal on translation, partly due to her alliance with her co-translator and husband, who teaches at the University of Washington. Her translation work includes well-known international poets like Valéry and Rilke, as well as poets like Romanian Jewish poet of the Holocaust Paul Antschel, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Celan.

Her skill in translating literature by Slavic writers became even more evident with the publication of Because the Sea Is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova (1989) featuring the work of a Bulgarian poet and novelist. Dimitrova, one of the best-loved writers in her homeland, became the first democratically elected vice-president of her country after the fall of communism. McHugh translated Dimitrova’s poems for Wesleyan Poetry in Translation (published by the Wesleyan University Press) with her husband, Nikolai Popov, a scholar whom she married in 1987. (Her first marriage in 1967 ended in divorce.) McHugh sometimes uses the name Niko Boris Popov McHugh when writing about her husband. Popov, an expert in Bulgarian and knowledgeable in the German and French languages, also helped to translate Celan’s poetry, which was always written in German.

In 1986, McHugh received a Bellagio grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. She published two more books of poetry during the 1980s: To the Quick (1987) and Shades (1988). In the late '80s, she also participated in an art project with Tom Phillips, resulting in a collectible book WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: The Class of Forty-Seven (1990). It consists of thirty images by Phillips which are interpreted in poems by McHugh and then further modified by Phillips. One of Phillips’s images, "A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel,” from the collaboration is appropriately used on the cover of McHugh’s essay collection Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993).

In 1994, Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, a collection of 24 new poems and selected poems from her five earlier books, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. The book won both the Harvard Review/Daniel Pollock Prize in 1995 and Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The New York Times Book Review chose this poetry collection as its "Notable Book of the Year." In 1996, after the book’s publication, she received a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Writing Award.

In 1998 McHugh received the Folger Library’s O.B. Hardison Prize for a poet who excels in teaching. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and received the PEN/Voelker Award. During this year, her poetry was anthologized in The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, alongside poet laureates like Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky, and poets McHugh studied and taught in her college courses, such as Charles Wright, Lucille Clifton, James Tate, Philip Levine, and Marilyn Hacker. McHugh also began to serve as a judge for numerous poetry competitions, including the National Poetry Series and the Laughlin Prize. She was a member of the Board of Directors for the Associated Writing Programs between 1981 and 1983. She served on the Literature Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts during 1983 and 1986. In 1991, she was the Coal-Royalty Chair at the University of Alabama. In 1992, McHugh was the Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati. In 1991, she was the visiting professor at the University of Iowa and, in 1994, at the University of California at Los Angeles.

She takes editing collections of younger poets seriously, and helped to select poems for Hammer and Blaze: a Gathering of Contemporary American Poets (2001), published by the University of Georgia Press, which she co-edited. About her job guest editing Ploughshares in Spring 2001, McHugh writes, “The sheer syntactical elegance of many of these new poems suggests an instrumental refinement for which I’m grateful: I’m an old Richard Wilbur/Anthony Hecht fan, and have had reason now and then to regret, during my quarter century of teaching in M.F.A. programs, the relative unfashionability of rhetorical flourish.”

At the end of 2001, McHugh’s sixth collection of poetry, The Father of the Predicaments, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. That same year, McHugh, with Nikolai Popov, received the first International Griffin Poetry Prize in translation for Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. Her next poetry collection, Eyeshot, was published in (2003), and her latest collection, Upgraded to Serious, was released in 2009.

McHugh is a judge for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Awards and honors[link]

• Two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts
• Griffin Poetry Prize
• Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation
• Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, University of Washington
• Finalist for the National Book Award
• Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
• Witter Bynner Fellowship
• PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
• O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize
• MacArthur Fellowship

Bibliography[link]

Poetry collections[link]

• Dangers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
• A World of Difference (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
• To the Quick (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987)
• Shades (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988)
• Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994)
• The Father of the Predicaments (Middletown Wesleyan University Press, 1999)
• Eyeshot (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
• Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)

Editor[link]

• The Best American Poetry 2007, Guest editor (2007)

Essays[link]

• Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1992)

Translations[link]

• D'Apres Tout—Poems by Jean Follain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
• Because the Sea is Black: Poems by Blaga Dimitrova, by McHugh and Nikolai Popov, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989)
• 107 Poems by Paul Celan, by McHugh and Popov (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000)
• Euripides: Cyclops, by McHugh and David Konstan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Heather McHugh at poets.org
• Heather McHugh at Seattle Arts and Lectures
• Heather McHugh at Ink Node
• Griffin Poetry Prize biography
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading, including video clip
• Audio of Heather McHugh's lecture "In Ten Senses: Some Sentences About Art's Senses and Intents at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities December 4, 2003.

Paul Celan (23 November 1920, Cernăuţi, Bukovina, Kingdom of Romania, current Chernivtsi, Ukraine – c. 20 April 1970, Paris) was a poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel into a Jewish family in Romania, and changed his name to "Paul Celan" (where Celan in Romanian would be pronounced Chelan, and was derived from Ancel, pronounced Antshel),^[1] becoming one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.

Life[link]

Early life[link]

Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuţi, Northern Bukovina, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, among others (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at Safah Ivriah, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization in 1927.

His mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. After his Bar Mitzvah in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and finished his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostering support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem, titled Mother's Day 1938 was an earnest, if sentimental, profession of love. In 1934, fourteen-year old Paul wrote a letter to his aunt Minna in Palestine, in which there is the eloquent phrase: "With regard to anti-Semitism in our school, I could write you a 300-page book."

Paul chose the "Lyceum Mihai great governor" (now Chernivtsi school № 5 before school № 23), where he studied from 1934-1938; the students there had ample opportunity to develop their language and literary skills. At this time Celan began to secretly write poetry. After graduating from high school, he was, at the insistence of his parents, enrolled in 1938 at the medical faculty of the University of Tours (France). The beginning of World War II found him on a vacation in Chernivtsi. Not being able to return to France, he became a student of Romanticism at Chernivtsi University. Celan graduated from the gymnasium/preparatory school called Liceul Marele Voivod Mihai (Great Voivode Mihai Prep School) in 1938.^[2]

In 1938 Celan traveled to Tours, France, to study medicine. The Anschluss precluded Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly-imposed Jewish quota. He returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees who died at Birkenau.

Life during World War II[link]

The Soviet occupation of Bukovina in June 1940 deprived Celan of any lingering illusions about Stalinism and Soviet Communism stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; the Soviets quickly imposed bureaucratic reforms on the university where he was studying Romance philology and deportations to Siberia started. Nazi Germany and Romania brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour a year later (see Romania during World War II).

On arrival in Cernăuţi July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies set the city's Great Synagogue on fire. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated William Shakespeare's Sonnets and continued to write his own poetry, all the while being exposed to traditional Yiddish songs and culture. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books.

The local mayor strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Accounts of his whereabouts on that evening vary, but it is certain that Celan was not with his parents when they were taken from their home on June 21 and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. Celan's parents were sent to a labour camp in the Ukraine, where his father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour. Later that year, after having himself been taken to a labour camp in the Romanian Old Kingdom, Celan would receive reports of his parents' deaths.

Celan remained imprisoned until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Early versions of Todesfuge were circulated at this time, a poem that clearly relied on accounts coming from the now-liberated camps in Poland. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death.

Life after the war[link]

Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet antisemitism, Celan left the USSR in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists — Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, and Dolfi Trost —, and it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name.

A version of Todesfuge appeared as Tangoul Morţii ("Death Tango") in a Romanian translation of May 1947. The surrealist ferment of the time was such that additional remarks had to be published explaining that the dancing and musical performances of the poem were realities of the extermination camp life. Night and Fog, the earliest documentary on Auschwitz (Alain Resnais, 1955), includes a description of the Auschwitz Orchestra, an institution organized by the SS to assemble and play selections of German dances and popular songs. (The SS man interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for his film Shoah, who rehearsed the songs prisoners were made to sing in the death camp, remarked that no Jews who had taught the songs survived.)

Exodus and Paris years[link]

Due to the emerging of the communist regime in Romania, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmann, who had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic city it once was, which had harboured the then-shattered Austro-Hungarian Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948. In that year his first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen ("Sand from the Urns"), was published in Vienna by A. Sexl. His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernăuţi, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young Dutch singer and anti-Nazi resister who saw her husband of a few months tortured to death. She visited him twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951.

In 1952 Celan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to Germany^[3] where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of Group 47.^[4] At their May meeting he read his poem Todesfuge ("Death Fugue"), a depiction of concentration camp life. His reading style, which was maybe based on the way a prayer is given in a synagogue and Hungarian folk poems, was off-putting to some of the German audience. His poetry received a mixed reaction.^[3] When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the Group's prize for her collection Die gestundete Zeit (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name". He did not attend any other meeting of the Group.

The grave of Paul Celan at the Thiais cemetery near Paris

In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange, in Paris. He would send her many wonderful love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka's correspondence with Milena Jesenska and Felice Bauer. They married on December 21, 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family, and during the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters, including a very active exchange with Hermann Lenz and his wife, Hanne.^{[citation needed]} He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École Normale Supérieure. He was also a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work.^[5] Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960.^[6]

Celan committed suicide^[7] by drowning in the Seine river around April 20, 1970.

Celan: poetry and poetics[link]

Poetry after Auschwitz[link]

The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (or Holocaust) are defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:

"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all."^[8]

It has been written,^[9] inaccurately perhaps, that German is the only language that allows (us?) to penetrate the horror of Auschwitz, to describe death from within.

His most famous poem, the early Todesfuge, commemorating the death camps, is a work of great complexity and extraordinary power, and may have drawn some key motives^[10] from the poem Er^[11] by Immanuel Weissglas, another Czernovitz poet. The dual character of Margarete-Sulamith, with her golden-ashen hair, appears as a reflection of Celan's Jewish-German culture,^[10] while the blue-eyed "Master from Germany" embodies German Nazism.

In later years his poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, bearing comparison to the music of Anton Webern. He also increased his use of German neologisms, especially in his later works Fadensonnen ("Threadsuns") and Eingedunkelt ("Benighted"). In the eyes of some, Celan attempted in his poetry either to destroy or remake the German language. For others he retained a sense for the lyricism of the German language which was rare in writers of that time. As he writes in a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange on one of his trips to Germany: 'The German I talk is not the same as the language the German people are talking here'. Writing in German was a way for him to think back and remember his parents, particularly his mother, from whom he had learned the language. This is underlined in 'Wolfsbohne,' a poem in which Paul Celan addresses his mother. The urgency and power of Celan's work stem from his attempt to find words "after", to bear (impossible) witness in a language that gives back no words "for that which happened".

In addition to writing poetry (in German and, earlier, in Romanian), he was an extremely active translator and polyglot, translating literature from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and English into German.

Germany and German guilt[link]

Recent commentaries on Celan's relationship to Germany (its "irreparable offense", its "guilt" and — for many others — "silence" on the exterminations after 1945, and after the war) often point to Celan's poem "Todtnauberg". This poem was engendered by Celan's meeting and single encounter with the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Celan had read Heidegger beginning in 1951, and exclamation marks in his margin notes testify to an awareness that Heidegger had allowed his remarks on the "greatness" of National Socialism in the 1953 edition of Introduction to Metaphysics to stand without further comment.

Celan visited West Germany periodically, including trips arranged by Hanne Lenz, who worked in a publishing house in Stuttgart. Celan and his wife Gisèle often visited Stuttgart and the area on stopovers during their many vacations to Austria. On one of his trips, Celan gave a lecture at the University of Freiburg (on July 24, 1967) which was attended by Heidegger, who gave Celan a copy of Was heißt Denken? and invited him to visit his work retreat "die Hütte" ("the hut") at Todtnauberg the following day and walk in the Schwarzwald. Although he may not have been willing to be photographed with Heidegger after the Freiburg lecture (or to contribute to Festschriften honoring Heidegger's work) Celan accepted the invitation and even signed Heidegger's guest book at the famous "hut".

The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview Only a God can save us now, which he had just given to Der Spiegel on condition of posthumous publication. That would seem to be the extent of the meeting. Todtnauberg was written shortly thereafter and sent to Heidegger as the first copy of a limited bibliophile edition. Heidegger responded with no more than a letter of perfunctory thanks.

Quotation[link]

Awards[link]

• Georg Büchner Prize 1960

Bibliography[link]

In German[link]

• Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns, 1948)
• Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory, 1952)
• Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold, 1955)
• Sprachgitter (Speechwicket / Speech-Grille, 1959)
• Die Niemandsrose (The Nomansrose / The No-One's-Rose, 1963)
• Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967)
• Fadensonnen (Threadsuns / Twinesuns / Fathomsuns, 1968)
• Lichtzwang (Light-Compulsion / Lightstrength, 1970)
• Schneepart (Snowpart / Snow-Part [posthumous], 1971)
• Zeitgehöft (Timestead / Homestead of Time [posthumous], 1976)

Translations[link]

Celan's poetry has been translated into English, with many of the volumes being bilingual. The most comprehensive collections are from John Felstiner, Pierre Joris, and Michael Hamburger, who revised his translations of Celan over a period of two decades. Recently Ian Fairley released his English translations.

Joris has also translated Celan's German poems into French.

(Note: this incomplete list is chronological from the year of publication of the translation, the most recent listed first)

• The Meridian: Final Version - Drafts - Materials, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris (2011)
• The Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, translated by Susan H. Gillespie (2011)
• Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann: Correspondence, translated by Wieland Hoban (2010)
• From Threshold to Threshold, translated by David Young (2010)
• Snow Part, translated by Ian Fairley (2007)
• Paul Celan: Selections, edited and with an introduction by Pierre Joris (2005)
• Fathomsuns/Fadensonnen and Benighted/Eingedunkelt, translated by Ian Fairley (2001)
• Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition, translated by Michael Hamburger (2001)
• Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, edited and translated by John Felstiner (2000)(winner of the PEN, MLA, and American Translators Association prizes)
• Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh (2000) (winner of the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
• Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, translated by Christopher Clark, edited with an introduction by John Felstiner (1998)
• Atemwende/Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris (1995)
• Collected Prose, edited by Rosmarie Waldrop (1986) ISBN 0-935296-92-1
• "Last Poems", translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin (1986)
• Paul Celan, 65 Poems, translated by Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky (1985)
• "Speech-Grille and Selected Poems", translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1971)

In Romanian[link]

• Paul Celan şi "meridianul" său. Repere vechi şi noi pe un atlas central-European, Andrei Corbea Hoisie

Bilingual[link]

• Paul Celan. Biographie et interpretation/Biographie und Interpretation, editor Andrei Corbea Hoisie

Writers translated by Celan[link]

Biographies[link]

• Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth Israel Chalfen, intro. John Felstiner, trans. Maximilian Bleyleben (New York: Persea Books, 1991)
• Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, John Felstiner (Yale Univ. Press, 1995)

Further reading[link]

• Daive, Jean. Under The Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 2009.

Selected criticism[link]

• Englund, Axel. Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
• Hillard, Derek. Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan. Bucknell University Press, 2010.
• Celan Studies Peter Szondi, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Harvey Mendelsohn (2003)
• Word Traces Aris Fioretos (ed.), includes contributions by Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1994)
• Poetry as Experience Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, translated by Andrea Tarnowski (1999)
• Gadamer on Celan: ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’ and Other Essays, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and ed. by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (1997)
• Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan Jacques Derrida, trans. and ed. by Thomas Dutoit, Outi Pasanen, a collection of mostly late works, including "Rams," which is also a memorial essay on Gadamer and his "Who Am I and Who Are You?", and a new translation of Schibboleth (2005)
• Poésie contre poésie. Celan et la littérature Jean Bollack. PUF (2001)
• L'écrit : une poétique dans l'oeuvre de Celan Jean Bollack. PUF (2003)
• Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970 James K. Lyon (2006)
• Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: le sens d'un dialogue Hadrien France-Lenord (2004)
• Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers, Katja Garloff (2005)
• Carson, Anne. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1999)
• Kligerman, Eric. Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin and New York, 2007 (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, 3).
• Andréa Lauterwein: Anselm Kiefer /Paul Celan. Myth, Mourning and Memory. With 157 illustrations, 140 in colour. Thames & Hudson, London 2007. ISBN 978-0-500-23836-3
• Arnau Pons, "Vor Morgen. Bachmann und Celan. Die Minne im Angesicht der Morde". Kultur & Genspenster. Heft Nr. 10, 2010.
• Werner Wögerbauer, "Das Gesicht des Gerechten. Paul Celan besucht Friedrich Dürrenmatt", 'Kultur & Genspenster. Heft Nr. 10, 2010. ISBN 978-3-938801-73-4

Audio-visual[link]

Recordings[link]

• Ich hörte sagen, readings of his original compositions
• Gedichte, readings of his translations of Osip Mandelstam and Sergei Yesenin
• Six Celan Songs, texts of his poems "Chanson einer Dame im Schatten", "Es war Erde in ihnen", "Psalm", "Corona", "Nächtlich geschürzt", "Blume", sung by Ute Lemper, set to music by Michael Nyman
• Tenebrae (Nah sind wir, Herr) from Drei Gedichte von Paul Celan (1998) of Marcus Ludwig, sung by the ensemble amarcord
• Einmal (from Atemwende), Zähle die Mandeln (from Mohn und Gedächtnis), Psalm (from Die Niemandsrose), set to music by Giya Kancheli as parts II - IV of Exil, sung by Maacha Deubner, ECM (1995)

Notes and resources[link]

External links[link]

• Exclusive Biography «Memory in stone»

Selected Celan exhibits, sites, homepages on the web

• Pegasos overview
• Biography of Celan at the George Mason University site
• Overview at Littlebluelight.com
• Limited-edition of Paul Celan's reading before the German literary club, Group 47, from The Shackman Press
• Spike Magazine's analysis on the writing of Celan
• Against Time: Essays on Paul Celan on Point and Circumference

Selected poetry, poems, poetics on the web (English translations of Celan)

• Recent Celan essays by John Felstiner: 1) “Paul Celan Meets Samuel Beckett,” American Poetry Review, July-Aug. 2004 & poetrydaily.org, 6 July 2004 (http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essafels.htm); 2) “Writing Zion: An Exchange between Celan and Amichai,” New Republic, 12 June 2006 (http://www.tnr.com/article/writing-zion) & “Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai: An Exchange on Nation and Exile,” wordswithoutborders.org, (http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/an-exchange-on-nation-and-exile); 3) “The One and Only Circle: Paul Celan’s Letters to Gisèle,” Fiction 54, 2008 (http://www.fictioninc.com/issues/number54/the-one-and-only-circle-paul-c) and (expanded) Mantis, 2009 (https://www.stanford.edu/group/mantis/cgi-bin/node/112)
• "Die Zweite Bibliographie," Jerry Glenn (copious bibliography, through 1995, in German)(http://www.artsci.uc.edu/german/celan/celanbibliography.htm)
• Celan on Mandelstam: extracts from the variorum edition of the Meridian speech featured on Pierre Joris's blog, this is a page of notes, fragments, sketches for sentences,etc., Celan took when preparing a radio-essay on Osip Mandelstam. However, as Joris points out: "some of the thinking reappears, transformed, in the Meridian".
• Four New Translations of Paul Celan, by Ian Fairley in Guernica Magazine
• Fugue of Death (English translation of Todesfuge)
• Death Fugue (Another English translation of Todesfuge)
• InstaPLANET Cultural Universe: three poems from Die Gedichte aus dem Nachlass in the original German with a translation into English by Ana Elsner
• Dissertation on the French Reception of Celan
• Ring-Narrowing Day Under, one of seven poems translated from the German by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov, originally published in Jubilat
• Extract from Lightduress (Cycle 6), translated by Pierre Joris; originally published by Samizdat
• Dan Kaufman & Barbez music recorded an album based upon the life and poems of Paul Celan, published on the Tzadik label in the series of Radical Jewish Culture.
• translations from ATEMWENDE/ Breathturn Cal Kinnear translates Paul Celan

Selected multimedia presentations

• Recordings of Celan reading a selection of his poems, including Todesfuge, with translations by John Felstiner
• Griffin Poetry Prize reading by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh from Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan - including video clip