Here are the long overdue translations of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems (one dated 1947) by a great poet, Nina Cassian: they contain the buds, bloom, and deathly flowering of the obsessions found in all of Celan’s work—never-before reaches of language, death, drowning, deportation, love, pride, loneliness. The book also includes important essays by Nina Cassian on Celan’s early life and work, and post-WWII Bucharest and Paris.