John Friedmann to Read Celan’s Poetry August 6

All are welcome to join in a special presentation of the poetry of Paul Celan August 6 at the Orcas Public Library, from 1 to 3 p.m. John Friedmann will read from his translations, present a biographical and historical context for the poems, and describe his work as a translator.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from post-World War II Europe. Among his most well-known and often-anthologized poems is “Deathfugue.” The poem opens with the words “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night” and it goes on to offer a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps.

Celan’s parents were deported and eventually died in Nazi labor camps; Celan himself was interned for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army. After the war, in 1945, he moved to Bucharest and became friends with many of the leading Romanian writers of the time. He worked as a reader in a publishing house and as a translator. He also began to publish his own poems and translations. He lived briefly in Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature. During the 1960s he published more than six books of poetry and gained international fame. In addition to his own poems, he remained active as a translator.(Notes excerpted from the Academy of American Poets site https://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/316).

John Friedmann divides his time between Orcas Island and Vancouver, B.C. where he is honorary professor at the University of British Columbia. Some of his poems have been published in various small collections, but mostly he has written for his own delight. He also loves to translate poetry, especially the larger works of Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Paul Celan.

John has taught at MIT, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, UCLA, the University of Melbourne, the National University of Taiwan, and is currently an Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Throughout his long life, he has been an advisor to governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Mozambique, and China where he was appointed Honorary Foreign Advisor to the China Academy of Planning and Urban Design.

He is the author of 21 books and over 150 articles on a wide range of topics, including regional planning, urbanization, social development, and planning theory, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Farsi. Among the many honors he has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship and Honorary doctorates from the University of Dortmund and the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. He was the first person to receive the prestigious Distinguished Planning Educator Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in and in 2006 received the first UN-Habitat Lecture Award for lifetime achievement in the service of human settlements.His most recent book, Insurgencies: essays in planning theory, was published by Routledge in 2011.