Which COUNTRY has produced the greatest literature?

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Originally Posted by WICKES

OK, but we're having WH Auden back!

Personally I see T S Eliot as an anglo-American. It's not a bad group to be in. Christopher Hitchens identified himself as one, and you could make a case for Winston Churchill, Henry James and Ezra Pound among others.

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I don't think that England has the same claim on Pound as it does on Eliot. For one thing he never renounced his citizenship. For another, he only spent a dozen years in England. He spent 35 years of his life in Italy and 36 years in America. If any country besides the USA has a claim to him it's Italy. A Polish immigrant to England like Conrad definitely belongs to England because he doesn't start writing until he gets there and only writes in his adopted language. Expatriots like Nabokov are really hard to pin down that way though since he has a Russian period a German period and an American period of roughly even chunks of time. I generally think of him as Russian though, for the sake of his formative years. It makes one wonder though, if perhaps Rudyard Kipling or George Orwell don't belong to the Indian subcontinent as much as they do to England.

This thread is interesting but it is an odd question to begin with. It's a bit like asking which country has the nicest views. It is too subjective to have a definite answer. Personally ( And here's tuppenceworth of opinion) I cannot see past America for both quantity and quality of prose fiction in the last sixty years. However my own country is unsurpassed in terms of song over the last three centuries (And that is literature too) Hmm I think that was fourpenceworth!

that is a loaded question. My opinion is Russia

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

America, France, Britain, and Russia certainly have an impressive number of major writers. But one could add any number of other national bodies of literature that are quite impressive in their own rite:

German- Nibelungenlied, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Grimmelshausen, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Kleist, Eichendorf, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Kafka, Georg Trakl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Walter Benjamin, Frank Wedekind, Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, Boll, Max Frisch, Durrenmatt, Paul Celan, etc...

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Why would Celan represent Germany? He was born in a Jewish Romanian family. If it's because he wrote in German, then Cioran, Ionesco and Fondane are French authors? And what about Mircea Eliade? Is he French? Or German? Or Romanian? Or North-American? Because he wrote in them all. And Beckett? What is he? Irish, or French?

He was Irish but wrote in French. There are enough real problems.

He also wrote in English. And in German too. But he still is Irish. So, then, what exactly makes Celan a German?

I can't answer that as I don't know anything at all about Celan. I cannot recall ever hearing about him/ her.

Too bad, he's one of the greatest XXth century poets. Not saying that you should've heard about him, as there are a lot of famous writers that don't, in fact, deserve any attention, but you should really have a look upon Celan's work, it really is something else, pure poetry at its finest.

I'd say England has the best writers in the world. Then followed by Italy and France --- in that order.

I wouldn´t chose a country and not even a language. There are several issues, besides personal preferences as for example there are older and newer literatures, there are literatures that more readers have acces to, because of the language they are written in and the comercial distribuition of the books.

...what exactly makes Celan a German?

He's not a German, but rather a Romanian-born German poet in that his poetic oeuvre was largely written in German.

Some poems of Celan in English (don´t know if the translation is good.)
http://poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/German/Celan.htm

The best translations of Celan into English are probably those by Michael Hamburger who is one of the finest translators of German poetry.

http://www.english.txstate.edu/cohen...Hamburger.html

The title of the thread is Which COUNTRY has produced the greatest literature?, thus including Celan in the same bracket with Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Hölderlin is an aberration, for he was born in Bukovina to a German-speaking Jewish family, and he later studied in France and Romania, only to spend nearly his entire adult life in Paris, having French citizenship. The use of a German idiom and the recollection of his mother's tongue (which could be directly traced to the Holocaust) were the sole things that linked Celan to Germany, to that one country in which the official language was the language of his mother's assassins. You cannot atribute an author to a country merely on account of his choosen language.

While Cioran's assertion that One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other, is basically true, understanding that Celan was indeed inhabiting the German language (his use of language is unrivaled as far as I'm concerned regarding the German language in the XXth century, hence the dificulty translators are confronted with when trying to transpose his poetry into another tongue), but to imply that Celan was a product of Germany borders on the preposterous.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

The best translations of Celan into English are probably those by Michael Hamburger who is one of the finest translators of German poetry.

http://www.english.txstate.edu/cohen...Hamburger.html

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Thank you very much for this thread stluke. Both translations are very interesting.