In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a Music tilted Against Music's complacency; words punished for their plausib...In the writing of Paul Celan even we readers who can hear poetry only dimly in German can sense the greatness of his invention: the cadences of a Music tilted Against Music's complacency; words punished for their plausibility by being reinvented and fused together and broken apart; syntax chopped and stretched to crack and expose its crust of dead rhetoric michael hamburger has earned our gratitude for rendering these poems into a reasonably inventive English "Robert pinsky, the new republic.