Pierre Joris, a poet and translator "who tackled some of the 20th century's most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan," died February 27, the New York Times reported. He was 78.
Although he wrote dozens of volumes of his own poetry and prose, much of his life's work was spent grappling with the poetry of Celan. In 2014, Joris told the New York State Writers Institute that a public reading of Celan's "Death Fugue" was "an epiphany" for him as a 15-year-old high school student in his native Luxembourg.
"My hair stood on end," he recalled. His translation of the poem begins:
Black milk of morning, we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
"Death Fugue" was an early work of Celan, however, and it was "the enigmatic poetry of his final years" that Joris was determined to take on, the Times noted, adding: "In eight books of translations published over more than 50 years, Joris sought to render in English Celan's experiment with language: to transmit what can't be rendered in words--the Holocaust and its many aftermaths, physical and psychological--by creating an open-ended poetry of multiple possible meanings."
"He did the impossible, because it is impossible to translate Celan," poet Andrei Codrescu said in an interview.
Joris's Celan translations include the books The Collected Earlier Poetry; Memory Rose into Threshold Speech; Breathturn into Timestead; Paul Celan: Selections; and Lightduress by Paul Celan. Among Joris's own books are Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999; A Nomad Poetics; and Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012. He also edited anthologies, including the two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, with Jerome Rothenberg.
Asked to explain why he was drawn to translating, Joris told Arabic Literature in 2011: "Because, by accident of birth, I was blessed or damned with a batch of different languages and a perverse pleasure of pitting them and their different musics against each other."