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James K. Lyon. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger. An Unresolved Conversation, 1951 – 1970. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. [Book Review]

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posted on 2017-05-21, 05:56 authored by Robert Savage
It is a sign of the current vogue – or, perhaps better, mystique –attached to the names of Celan and Heidegger in the U.S. academy that the present study, essentially a well-executed piece of philological spade-work, should be appearing under the imprint of one of the more illustrious university presses. Which is not to suggest that the book is undeserving of publication: Lyon sifts through the available evidence with admirable thor-oughness, discovering a proto-Heideggerian poetics in Celan’s early essay “The Dream of a Dream”; lingering over the copious squiggles, marginalia and underlinings in Celan’s copies of the philosopher’s books, many of them personally inscribed to him by the author; rereading the central document of their “unresolved conversation”, the much-discussed poem ‘Todtnauberg’, in the light of eyewitness reports of their seminal 1967 encounter at the philosopher’s hillside chalet; and pondering the significance of the fascination that Heidegger’s thought continued to exert on Celan as he descended ever deeper into mental illness.

History

Publication date

2007

Issue

13

Pages

149-151

Document type

Book Review

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