Paul Celan Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Paul Celan was the pseudonym of Paul Antschel (November 23, 1920 - April, 1970), who is considered one of the few major poets of the post-World War II era. He was born in Romania, lived in France, and wrote in German.
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2 Poetry 3 Bibliography 4 External links |
Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, in the region of Bukovina, then part of Romania. The city, which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I, would later be annexed by the Soviet Union and today belongs to Ukraine, being called Chernivtsi.
In 1938, Celan studied medicine in Tours, France, but returned to Czernowitz in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. In 1941, German forces occupied the region and the Jews were confined to a ghetto. In 1942, Celan's parents were sent to an internment camp in Transnistria, where his father died of typhus and his mother was shot. Celan himself was sent to several labour camps in Moldavia.
After the war, Paul Celan managed to leave Romania for Vienna, Austria, in 1947, where he published his first book of poetry, Der Sand aus den Urnen (Sand from the Urns). He then moved to Paris in 1948, where he taught the German language at the École Normale Supérieure. In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, in Paris. They married on December 21st, 1952 and during the following 19 years they wrote over 700 letters. Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris until his death by suicide, drowning in the Seine in late April, 1970.
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:
"It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, "enriched" by all this."
Despite his declaration that language remains, it is indeed only remnants that are left him; 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 relatively early Death Fugue (Todesfuge in German), commemorates the death camps, negating Adorno's famous assertion that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Celan, always sensitive to criticism, took the dictum personally; his later poem, "Engführung" ("Stretto" or "The Straitening") was his own re-writing of "Death Fugue" into ever-more desperate language.
In later years his poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, bearing comparison to the music of Webern. 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 stems from his attempt to find words "after," to bear (impossible) witness in a language that gives back no words "for that which happened."
This is an Article on Paul Celan. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Paul Celan Life
Poetry
Bibliography
In German
In English
There has been a recent flurry of translations of Celan's poetry into English. The most comprehensive collections are Michael Hamburger's, which has been revised by him over a period of more than two decades, and Pierre Joris'.External links