One of the great literary events of this year

"A nothing / we were, we are, we will be / still, in flower: / that of nothing, the / Rose of Nobody." These verses from the third stanza of the poem Psalm contain the title of what is one of the capital books of Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose (1963). The Catalan version of Nobody's Rose, Now published in a bilingual edition, with a translation and commentary edited by Arnau Pons, by LaBreu Edicions, it allows us to read and get to know in depth one of the essential books of German and universal poetry of the 20th century.

"Illegibility of this / World. Everything double," states Celan in one of the poems of Schneepart (Snow particle), from 1971. The poem, for the poet of Nobody's Rose, is a process, a trail we follow, in search of reality. It reminds us of Beda Allemann, one of the first editors of the poet's poetic work. If the world is illegible and double, Celan, with his work, creates another world, a world of his own with his language, in search of reality. And his reality, as a Jew, is marked by the death of his father and mother in the extermination camps in 1942.

The pain of the cruel murder of his parents and their absence will forever mark his life and work. And an unanswered question will lead him to rebel against his own mother tongue, German: How to write in the language of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger? Authors, among others, whom the Nazis had adopted as their own, turning the language into a spearhead against the Jews and all the pariahs they brought to the death camps. As Victor Klemperer attests and studies in the essential essay LTI. The language of the Third Reich –In Catalan, in Folch & Folch – the Nazis turned the German language into a weapon of mass destruction. Against this received German language, to overthrow this murderous political, cultural and linguistic legacy, Celan constructs a singular and unique work that deconstructs the language and the received poetic legacy. The poems of Nobody's Rose, "Zürich, Hotel La Cigüeña," dedicated to the poet Nelly Sachs, and "Tübingen, Janer," about Hölderlin, reveal Celan's conflicting dialogue with his own tradition. To construct this groundbreaking work, which revolutionizes German and European poetry, he creates his own language, which is not always understandable and which must be deciphered and read carefully. This is why translating Celan is not easy. Antoni Pous, Celan's first translator into Catalan, already wrote in the prologue to Translations by Paul Celan (1976), warned about the difficulty of translating it. To translate Celan, it is necessary to know his work and his poetics well if one wants his magmatic and precise poetry to resonate, appropriately and faithfully to the author, in another language.

Since, in 1995, the poet Arnau Pons published his version of the cycle Atemkristall by Paul Celan, entitled Breath Crystal, on the Negranit label, has continued to delve deeper into the study of the German poet's work. His acquaintance with and friendship with the French philologist Jean Bollack, a great scholar of Celan's work, in 2000, was providential in consolidating and expanding this research. Since then, Arnau Pons, author of Celan, Reader of Freud. A Lecture (Leonard Muntaner, 2006), has translated Bollack's essays into Spanish Heart Stone. A posthumous poem by Paul Celan (Arena books, 2002) and Poetry against poetry. Celán and literature (Trotta, 2005), or Peter Szondi, Studies on Celan (Trotta, 2005). And, still, in Catalan, with rigor and demand, the books of Celan, From threshold to threshold (2012), Breath Crystal (2014) and Tongue bars (2019), in a bilingual edition published by LaBreu Edicions. Now, in this splendid and exemplary edition of Nobody's Rose, in the translation and commentary by Arnau Pons who, with his usual scalpel, reflects on the understanding and translation of the poems, thus broadens and enriches the critical reading and knowledge of Celan's work in Catalan.

Proposing to make available all of Paul Celan's poetic work in Catalan, as Pons and LaBreu Edicions do, is a major and ambitious poetic, philological, and intellectual challenge that must be commended. We will eagerly await the publication of new volumes with the other books of Celan's poetry. In my opinion, it would also be appropriate to publish a volume of his prose, as Dialogue in the mountains (where he describes and reflects on his failure to meet Theodor W. Adorno in 1959) and speeches, such as the one for the Bremen City Prize (1958) or the one for the Georg Büchner Prize (1960), The meridian, fundamental to understanding his work. Without a doubt, the appearance of Nobody's Rose by Paul Celan, in a version by Arnau Pons, is one of the great literary events of that year.