breathturn into timestead the collected later poetry

In July 1948, he arrived in Paris and lived there until his death by self-drowning in the Seine in 1970.Ĭelan’s first major collection of poems, Mohn und Gedächtnis, (Poppy and Memory) was published in 1948 by a German publisher. For two years, he lived in Bucharest where he wrote his most famous poem “Todesfugue” (“Death-fugue”) it was translated into Romanian and published in 1947 in a magazine called “Tango of Death.” There he became Paul “Celan,” an anagram of Ançel, the alternate spelling of Antschel. He returned to Czernowitz in 1944 (he either escaped or was released) with at least 75 original poems, not long before the Soviets occupied Romania.

He also learned Yiddish from fellow inmates – perhaps the source of his earliest insight into the reutilization of German. That is one reason why he had to make a new language for himself, a language at once probing and groping, critical and innovative and why the richer his verbal and formal resources grew, the more strictly he confined them to the orbit of his most urgent concerns.”ĭuring his own nineteen-month internment in a forced labor camp, Celan devised translations of Verlaine, Housman, Éluard and Shakespearean sonnets. His German could not and must not be the German of his destroyers. The Czernowitz of his youth was host to several languages and cultures, but as Michael Hamburger, another of Celan’s translators, has pointed out, the city was “a German-speaking enclave that had been destroyed by the Germans. “His heaviest guilt was a betrayal,” one of Celan’s later friends recalled. The father died of typhus later that fall the mother was shot as unfit for work. Returning to the house, he found it sealed, his parents gone. One account tells that on the night of June 27, 1942, having failed to convince his parents to leave their house and hide, Celan took shelter in a cosmetics factory.

The horror was their deaths after deportation from Czernowitz through orders of a Romanian governor to a work camp located 400 kilometers to the south. In her introduction to Glottal Stops: 100 Poems, McHugh and co-translator Nikolai Popov wrote, “No one can reproduce in a language other than German Celan’s tragic relation to the language which was his instrument and life, a language that had remained silent through the horror.”Ĭelan was born Paul Antschel to Jewish German-speaking parents. Reading his work, one may also wonder if his words are poised against translators. “Paul Celan more than any other poet poised the word against its affiliations,” said Heather McHugh, one of several Anglophone translators of Celan’s poetry.

Breathturn into timestead the collected later poetry