"In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a music tilted against music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric Michael Hamburger has earned our gratitude for rendering these poems into a reasonably inventive English "Robert Pinsky THE NEW REPUBLIC. Parallel German text and English translation.
