Pierre Joris, translator of the “impossible” Paul Celan, dies at 78
Pierre Joris, poet and translator who faced some of the most difficult verses of the 20th century, making the complex work of the famous German poet Paul Celan in English, died on February 27 in his home in Brooklyn. He was 78 years old.His wife, Nicole Peyrafitte, said that the cause was cancer complications.Joris was the author of dozens of volumes of his poetry and prose. But much of the work of his life was spent grappling with Celan's poetry, which many critics considered, in the words of a scholar, "probably the greatest European poet in the post -war period".That greatness comes with a hitch for readers, however: the diabolical difficulty of a writer whose texts were trained and deformed by the chogiol of the Holocaust - "what happened", as Celan called it. Both his parents were ass...