At any one time I have a number of books on the go—poetry, fiction, books for researching my own poetry projects and usually something on art. There are a number of poets—Stevens, Pound, Char, Lorca, Celan—who are as vital to me as breath, and a recent purchase has been Celan’s Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry translated by Pierre Joris. Its appearance is timely, coming as it does on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In his Introduction, Joris explains how he has focused on what Celan was doing philologically and syntactically with his subversion of the German language. I have just begun to dip into this treasure and to compare some of the translations with other versions I have, such as the wonderful Carcanet edition by Ian Farley.

It seems appropriate at this time to move on to what I am reading in fiction, as Sheng Keyi has taken Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ as the title for her new novel. The novel begins in the city of Beiping, capital of Dayang, where the sudden appearance of a tower of excrement precipitates civil unrest and violence. Subsequently the main character, Yuan Mengliu, finds himself in the utopian society of Swan Valley. There, language is employed in the service of the state, with poets granted supreme status if their verse is eulogistic. In an earlier novel, Northern Girls, also translated by Shelly Bryant, Sheng demonstrated her debt to the ribald comedy of the traditional and contemporary Chinese novel, but has in Death Fugue developed it into a refined, satirical allegory depicting a society satiated with extraordinary wealth, and which has become so pacified that its citizens can accept and justify any restriction on their freedom.