azdak

These hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd, and bareness everywhere:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

William Shakespeare


There is an amazing translation of this - and twenty of Shakespeare's other sonnets - by Paul Celan. His translations would be astonishing under any circumstances, but Celan wrote them between 1941 and 1942 at the tender age of 22, whilst trapped in a Jewish ghetto in Romania after the arrival of the Nazis. In 1942 he was transported to a labour camp. His parents were transported to a different labour camp and did not survive the year. In his own right, rather than as a translator, he's most famous for Death Fugue.

"There is nothing on earth that can prevent a poet from writing, not even the fact that he's Jewish and German is the language of his poems." Paul Celan


Sie, die den Blick, auf dem die Blicke ruhn,
Geformt, gewirkt aus Zartestem: die Stunden -:
Sie kommen wieder, Anderes zu tun:
Was sie begründet, richten sie zugrunde.

Ist Sommer? Sommer war. Schon führt die Zeit
Den Wintern und Verfinstrungen entgegen.
Laub grünte, Saft stieg… Einstmals. Überschneit
Die Schönheit. Und Entblößtes allerwegen.

Dann, blieb der Sommer nicht als Sommers Geist
Im Glas zurück, verflüssigt und gefangen:
Das Schöne wär nicht, wäre sinnverwaist
Und unerinnert und dahingegangen.

Doch so, als Geist, gestaltlos, aufbewahrt,
West sie, die Blume, weiter, winterhart.


Here he is, aged 17.