Threadsuns

A Bilingual Edition, with German and English on facing pages.

Born in Czernowitz—the capital of the Bukovina (now part of the Ukraine and Rumania)—in 1920, Paul Celan is now recognized as one of the great poets of the 20th century. Threadsuns, published as Fadensonnen two years before his suicide by drowning, continues Green Integer’s commitment to publish his last great works.

One of Celan’s most important books, Threadsuns follows the Green Integer press publication of Breathturn, which received international critical acclaim. Consisting of 105 poems, arranged in five cycles, Threadsuns was composed between September 1965 and June 1967. If Breathturn was the opening gambit of Celan’s “turn,” the entry into the late work, then Threadsuns—the volume that may have received the least amount of commentary and analysis to date—may be said to be not only an extension or continuation of the previous volume, but the full-blown realization of Celan’s late work.

Poet, translator, and essayist Pierre Joris is the author of Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999, and A Nomad Poetics (essays) and co-editor (with Jerome Rothenberg) of the award-winning Poems for the Millennium anthologies. He teaches poetry and poetics at SUNY-Albany. During fall of 2003 he was Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.