Paul Celan: Voltak éjszakák [There Were Nights]. Poems written in Romanian translated by Károly Jánk. Illustrated by Beatrix Bartha. Targu Mures, 2017

Category: poetry
Language: Hungarian
Pages: 48
Cover: paperback, jacket
ISBN 978-606-8957-00-5

The author:

Paul Celan, one of the most well-known figures of post-war poetry, wrote in German, which is considered “the language of death” in his home country, Bukovina. After the war he finally left Chernovica and lived in Bucharest for a while, then fled to Vienna.

The book:

Voltak éjszakák (There were nights) is a volume of Paul Celan’s early poems written in Romanian and translated into Hungarian by Károly Jánk. Celan left Bucharest in 1947 and the manuscripts of the 17 poems were kept by his friend Petre Solomon, who published them in his memoir 40 years later. In 1989, Suhrkamp Publishers issue Paul Celan’s Das Frühwerk with the 17 texts in it. Our volume of Celan’s early poetry has been illustrated by Beatrix Bartha.