To a non-German speaker like me, the relationship between Celan's poems and Hamburger's English rendering of them is bound to be a mystery. I can only acknowledge how moved I have been by this volume; above all, feeling haunted by the images of immense tragedy which these poems evoke, irrespective of the degree of understanding I can bring to them.
My reaction was only enhanced when I read how Hamburger felt that he had "not succeeded in penetrating the sense of many of his lyrics". He went on to explain that he believed the exception to this failure had been his engagement with the concentration camp poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue), which Celan had himself repudiated as being untypical of his work. Hamburger commented: "That doesn't matter to me, I wear it inside me like a graft." I cannot think of a more vivid expression of one's relationship with a poem that has made its mark.
