Poet, born in Cschernowszy, Romania, the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. Cschernowszy became a Jewish ghetto in 1941, and Celan's parents were deported to a concentration camp in 1942 while he was sent to a labour camp (19424). He moved to Paris in 1948 and took French citizenship. Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), his first collection of poems to be published in Germany, won him immediate acclaim. His poetry, influenced by French Symbolism and Surrealism, is marked by its rich use of imagery and its melodious quality, while dealing with the horrors of life in the ghetto. The haunting beauty of the poem Todesfugue, which he later rejected, has become a synonym for the Holocaust. His later poetry, after the collection Sprachgitter (1959), is less accessible because of its use of coined words, paradox, and broken syntax. He was also a notable translator of Rimbaud, Valéry, Emily Dickinson, and others. Among his awards is the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1960. He committed suicide in 1970.
Celan is widely considered one of the finest European lyric poets of his time and one of the most profound, innovative and original poets of the 20th century..Early life
Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuţi, Bukovina, then part of Romania. After his Bar Mitzvah in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and terminated his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostering support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1938, Celan travelled to Tours, France to study medicine (the newly-imposed Jewish quota in Romanian universities and the Anschluss precluded Bucharest and Vienna), but returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. The Soviet occupation in June 1940 deprived Celan of any lingering illusions about Stalinism and Soviet Communism stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated William Shakespeare's Sonnets and continued to write his own poetry, all the while being exposed to traditional Yiddish songs and culture. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books. Accounts of his whereabouts on that evening vary, but it is certain that Celan was not with his parents when they were taken from their home on June 21 and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. Celan's parents were taken across the Bug river and handed over to the Germans, where his father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour. Later on, after having himself been taken to the labour camps in the Old Kingdom, Celan would receive reports of his parents' deaths earlier that year.
Celan remained in these labour camps until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon them, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control.
Life after the war
Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet antisemitism, Celan left Soviet-occupied territory in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists, and it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name. (One might recall the SS man interviewed by Claude Lanzmann for Shoah who rehearsed the songs prisoners were made to sing in the death camp, remarking that no Jews taught the song survived.)
Exodus
As Romanian autonomy became increasingly tenuous in the course of that year, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. In a published edition of these letters, near the end of the exchange, Celan seems to be entertaining an amorous interest in her.
Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris until his suicide by drowning in the Seine river in late April 1970.
Germany and German guilt
Celan visited West Germany periodically, including trips arranged by Hanna Lenz, who worked in a publishing house in Stuttgart. Celan had read Heidegger beginning in 1951, and exclamation marks in his margin notes testify to his awareness that Heidegger had allowed his remarks on the "greatness" of National Socialism in the 1953 edition of Introduction to Metaphysics to stand without further comment. (Celan may have refused to be photographed with Heidegger after the Freiburg lecture because Heidegger still had not commented over a decade later.)
Todtnauberg was written shortly thereafter and sent to Heidegger in the first copy of a limited bibliophile edition. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe reproaches Heidegger's silence on the extermination after 1945 as "unforgivable" and an "irreparable offense", making particular reference to Celan's pointed expression of:
einer Hoffnung, heute auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen, [a hope, today, of a thinker's coming word in the heart]In 1952 Celan received an invitation to the semiannual meetings of Group 47. with whom Celan had an affair, won the Group's prize for her collection Die gestundete Zeit (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name".
Celan's poetry
The experience of the Shoah and his parents' deaths are defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:
"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. even within the word "enriched" – "angereichert" (the quotations are Celan's) lies buried the word Reich, just as its thousand years echo in the thousand darknesses of murderous speech – language, perhaps, has been "through" too much.
His most famous poem, the early Todesfuge, commemorates the death camps, negating Theodor Adorno's famous caveat that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". In the eyes of some, Celan attempted in his poetry either to destroy or remake the German language. The urgency and power of Celan's work stem from his attempt to find words "after", to bear (impossible) witness in a language that gives back no words "for that which happened".
In addition to writing poetry (in German and, earlier, in Romanian), he was an extremely active translator and polyglot, translating literature from Romanian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and English into German.
Bibliography
In German
Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948) Mohn und Gedächtnis ("Poppy and Remembrance", 1952) Von Schwelle zu Schwelle ("From Threshold to Threshold", 1955) Sprachgitter ("Speech-grille", 1959) Die Niemandsrose ("The No-One's Rose", 1963) Atemwende ("Breath-turn", 1967) Fadensonnen ("Threadsuns", 1968) Lichtzwang ("Light-Compulsion", 1970) Schneepart ("Snow-part, posthumous", 1971)In English
There has been a recent increase in translations of Celan's poetry into English.
Paul Celan: Selections, edited and with an introduction by Pierre Joris (2005) Four Works by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris (2004) Atemwende/Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris (1995) Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition, translated by Michael Hamburger (2001) Fathomsuns/Fadensonnen and Benighted/Eingedunkelt, translated by Ian Fairley (2001) Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (2000) Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, translated by Nikolai Popov, Heather McHugh (2000) (winner of the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize) Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, translated by Christopher Clark (1998) Collected Prose, edited by Rosmarie Waldrop (1986) ISBN 0935296921 "Speech-Grille and Selected Poems", translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1971) "Last Poems", translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin (1986) Paul Celan, 65 Poems, translated by Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky (1985)
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