Paul Celan

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Paul Celan
Celan .jpg
Born Paul Antschel
(1920-11-23)23 November 1920
Cernăuți, Kingdom of Romania
(now Chernivtsi, Ukraine)
Died 20 April 1970(1970-04-20) (aged 49)
Paris, France
Occupation Writer
Nationality Romanian, French
Genre Poetry, translation
Spouse Gisèle Lestrange

Paul Celan (/ˈsɛlæn/;[1] German: [ˈtseːlaːn]; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a Romanian-born German language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți (German: Czernowitz), in the then Kingdom of Romania (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine), and adopted the pseudonym "Paul Celan". He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.

Life[edit]

Early life[edit]

Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți, Bukovina, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (when his birthplace was known as Czernowitz). His first home was in the Wassilkogasse in Cernăuți. His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at the Jewish school Safah Ivriah (meaning The Hebrew language).

Celan's mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of German literature who insisted German be the language of the house. In his teens Celan became active in Jewish Socialist organizations and fostered support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. His earliest known poem is titled Mother's Day 1938.

Paul attended the Liceul Marele Voievod Mihai (Great Prince Mihai Preparatory School, now Chernivtsi School No. 5), where he studied from 1934 until graduating in 1938. At this time Celan secretly began to write poetry.[2]

In 1938 Celan traveled to Tours, France, to study medicine. The Anschluss precluded his study in Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly imposed Jewish quota. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees who died at Birkenau. Celan returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages.

Life during World War II[edit]

Following the Soviet occupation of Bukovina in June 1940 deportations to Siberia started. A year later following the reconquest of Romania, Nazi Germany and the then fascist Romanian regime brought ghettos, internment, and forced labour (see Romania during World War II).

On arrival in Cernăuți July 1941 the German SS Einsatzkommando and their Romanian allies set the city's Great Synagogue on fire. 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. 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.

The local mayor strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances, until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Celan hoped to convince his parents to leave the country so as to escape certain persecution. While Celan was away from home, on June 21, 1942, his parents were taken from their home and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria Governorate, where two-thirds of the deportees eventually perished. Celan's father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot after being exhausted by forced labour. Later that year, after having himself been taken to a labour camp in Romania, Celan would receive reports of his parents' deaths.

Celan remained imprisoned in a work-camp until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death.

Life after the war[edit]

Considering emigration to Palestine, Celan left Cernăuţi in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with surrealists – Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, and Dolfi Trost – 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. Here he also met with the poets Rose Ausländer and Emannuel Weissglas, elements of whose works he would reuse in his poem Todesfuge (1944-5).

A version of Celan's poem Todesfuge appeared as "Tangoul Morţii" ("Death Tango") in a Romanian translation of May 1947. Additional remarks were published explaining that the dancing and musical performances evoked in the poem were images of realities of the extermination camp life.

Exodus and Paris years[edit]

On the emergence of the communist regime in Romania, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmann, who had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic capital it once was, which had harboured the then-shattered Austro-Hungarian Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948. In that year his first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen ("Sand from the Urns"), was published in Vienna by A. Sexl. His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernăuţi, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young Dutch singer and anti-Nazi resister who saw her husband of a few months tortured to death. She visited him twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951.

In 1952, Celan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to Germany[3] where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of Group 47.[4] At their May meeting he read his poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a depiction of concentration camp life. When Ingeborg Bachmann, 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". He did not attend any other meeting of the group.

The grave of Paul Celan at the Cimetière de Thiais near Paris

In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange, in Paris. He sent her many love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka's correspondence with Milena Jesenska and Felice Bauer. They married on December 21, 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family. During the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters; amongst the active correspondents of Celan were Hermann Lenz and his wife, Hanne.[5] He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work.[6] Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960.[7]

Celan committed suicide[8] by drowning in the Seine river in Paris, around April 20, 1970.

Poetry and poetics[edit]

The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (The Holocaust) 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. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.[9]

Celan also said: "There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German."[10]

His most famous poem, the early "Todesfuge", is a work of great complexity and power, which may have drawn some key motives from the poem "ER" by Immanuel Weissglas (de), another Czernovitz poet.[11] The characters of Margarete and Sulamith, with their respectively golden and ashen hair, can be interpreted as a reflection of Celan's Jewish-German culture,[11] while the blue-eyed "Master from Germany" embodies German Nazism.

In later years his poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, bearing comparison to the music of Anton Webern. He also increased his use of German neologisms, especially in his later works Fadensonnen ("Threadsuns") and Lichtzwang. In the eyes of some, Celan attempted in his poetry either to destroy or remake the German language. For others, he retained a sense for the lyricism of the German language which was rare in writers of that time. As he writes in a letter to his wife Gisèle Lestrange on one of his trips to Germany: "The German I talk is not the same as the language the German people are talking here". Writing in German was a way for him to think back and remember his parents, particularly his mother, from whom he had learned the language. This is underlined in "Wolfsbohne" (Lupin), a poem in which Paul Celan addresses his mother. 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, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English into German.

Awards[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

In German[edit]

Translations[edit]

Poem (Nachmittag mit Zirkus und Zitadelle) by Paul Celan on a wall in Leiden

Celan's poetry has been translated into English, with many of the volumes being bilingual. The most comprehensive collections are from John Felstiner, Pierre Joris, and Michael Hamburger, who revised his translations of Celan over a period of two decades. Recently Ian Fairley released his English translations.

Joris has also translated Celan's German poems into French.

(Note: This incomplete list is chronological by year of publication of the translation, the most recent listed first.)
  • Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Pierre Joris (2015)
  • The Meridian: Final Version – Drafts – Materials, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris (2011)
  • The Correspondence of Paul Celan and Ilana Shmueli, translated by Susan H. Gillespie with a Preface by John Felstiner (2011)
  • Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann: Correspondence, translated by Wieland Hoban (2010)
  • From Threshold to Threshold, translated by David Young (2010)
  • Snow Part, translated by Ian Fairley (2007)
  • Lichtzwang/Lightduress, translated and with an introduction by Pierre Joris, a bilingual edition (Green Integer, 2005)
  • Paul Celan: Selections, edited and with an introduction by Pierre Joris (2005)
  • Fathomsuns/Fadensonnen and Benighted/Eingedunkelt, translated by Ian Fairley (2001)
  • Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition, Revised Edition, translated by Michael Hamburger (2001)
  • Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, edited and translated by John Felstiner (2000) (winner of the PEN, MLA, and American Translators Association prizes)
  • Glottal Stop: 101 Poems, translated by Nikolai B. Popov and Heather McHugh (2000) (winner of the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
  • Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence, translated by Christopher Clark, edited with an introduction by John Felstiner (1998)
  • Atemwende/Breathturn, translated by Pierre Joris (1995)
  • Collected Prose, edited by Rosmarie Waldrop (1986) ISBN 0-935296-92-1
  • Last Poems, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin (1986)
  • Paul Celan, 65 Poems, translated by Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky (1985)
  • Nineteen Poems by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (1972)
  • "Speech-Grille" and Selected Poems, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1971)

In Romanian[edit]

  • Paul Celan şi "meridianul" său. Repere vechi şi noi pe un atlas central-European, Andrei Corbea Hoisie

Bilingual[edit]

  • Paul Celan. Biographie et interpretation/Biographie und Interpretation, editor Andrei Corbea Hoisie
  • Schneepart / Snøpart. Translated 2012 to Norwegian by Anders Bærheim and Cornelia Simon

Writers translated by Celan[edit]

About Translations

About translating David Rokeah from Hebrew ' Celan wrote: "David Rokeah was here for two days, I have translated two poems for him, mediocre stuff, and given him comments on other German translation, suggested improvements..I was glad, probably in the wrong place, to be able to decipher and translate a Hebrew text"[12]

Biographies[edit]

  • Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth Israel Chalfen, intro. John Felstiner, trans. Maximilian Bleyleben (New York: Persea Books, 1991)
  • Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, John Felstiner (Yale Univ. Press, 1995)

Further reading[edit]

  • Aquilina, Mario, The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
  • Daive, Jean. Under The Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop), Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 2009.
  • Daive, Jean. ALBIACH / CELAN (author, tr. Donald Wellman), Anne-Marie Albiach (author), (tr. Julian Kabza), Ann Arbor, MI: Annex Press, 2017.
  • John Felstiner, "Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai: An Exchange between Two Great Poets," Midstream 53, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2007)
  • John Felstiner "Writing Zion" Paul Celan and Yehuda Amichai: An Exchange between Two Great Poets, The New Republic, 5 June 2006
  • Hana Amichai: "The leap between the yet and the not any more" Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan, Haaretz, April 6, 2012 (Hebrew)
  • Mario Kopić: "Amfiteater v Freiburgu, julija 1967", Arendt, Heidegger, Celan, Apokalipsa, 153-154, 2011 (Slovenian)

Selected criticism[edit]

  • Englund, Axel. Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
  • Hillard, Derek. Poetry as Individuality: The Discourse of Observation in Paul Celan. Bucknell University Press, 2010.
  • Celan Studies Peter Szondi, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Harvey Mendelsohn (2003)
  • Word Traces Aris Fioretos (ed.), includes contributions by Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1994)
  • Poetry as Experience Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, translated by Andrea Tarnowski (1999)
  • Gadamer on Celan: 'Who Am I and Who Are You?' and Other Essays, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and ed. by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (1997)
  • Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan Jacques Derrida, trans. and ed. by Thomas Dutoit, Outi Pasanen, a collection of mostly late works, including "Rams," which is also a memorial essay on Gadamer and his "Who Am I and Who Are You?", and a new translation of Schibboleth (2005)
  • Poésie contre poésie. Celan et la littérature Jean Bollack. PUF (2001)
  • L'écrit : une poétique dans l'oeuvre de Celan Jean Bollack. PUF (2003)
  • Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 James K. Lyon (2006)
  • Paul Celan et Martin Heidegger: le sens d'un dialogue Hadrien France-Lanord (2004)
  • Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers, Katja Garloff (2005)
  • Carson, Anne. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1999)
  • Kligerman, Eric. Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin and New York, 2007 (Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, 3).
  • Andréa Lauterwein: Anselm Kiefer /Paul Celan. Myth, Mourning and Memory. With 157 illustrations, 140 in colour. Thames & Hudson, London 2007. ISBN 978-0-500-23836-3
  • Arnau Pons, "Vor Morgen. Bachmann und Celan. Die Minne im Angesicht der Morde". Kultur & Genspenster. Heft Nr. 10, 2010.
  • Werner Wögerbauer, "Das Gesicht des Gerechten. Paul Celan besucht Friedrich Dürrenmatt", 'Kultur & Genspenster. Heft Nr. 10, 2010. ISBN 978-3-938801-73-4

Audio-visual[edit]

Recordings[edit]

  • Ich hörte sagen, readings of his original compositions
  • Gedichte, readings of his translations of Osip Mandelstam and Sergei Yesenin
  • Six Celan Songs, texts of his poems "Chanson einer Dame im Schatten", "Es war Erde in ihnen", "Psalm", "Corona", "Nächtlich geschürzt", "Blume", sung by Ute Lemper, set to music by Michael Nyman
  • Tenebrae (Nah sind wir, Herr) from Drei Gedichte von Paul Celan (1998) of Marcus Ludwig, sung by the ensemble amarcord
  • "Einmal" (from Atemwende), "Zähle die Mandeln" (from Mohn und Gedächtnis), "Psalm" (from Die Niemandsrose), set to music by Giya Kancheli as parts II–IV of Exil, sung by Maacha Deubner, ECM (1995)
  • Pulse Shadows by Harrison Birtwistle; nine settings of poems by Celan, interleaved with nine pieces for string quartet (one of which is an instrumental setting of Todesfuge).[13]

Notes and resources[edit]

  1. ^ "Celan". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  2. ^ "The Schools of Czernowitz Graduating Class of 1938". Antschel, P., 2nd row from top. MuseumOfFamilyHistory.com. Retrieved November 19, 2009. 
  3. ^ Paul Celan By Paul Celan, Pierre Joris
  4. ^ Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: an unresolved conversation, 1951–1970, page 22
  5. ^ See: Paul Celan, Hanne und Hermann Lenz: Briefwechsel, ed. von Barbara Wiedemann (and others). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2001.
  6. ^ Hamburger p. xxiii. For detail on this traumatic event, see Felstiner, Paul Celan, op. cit. pp. 72, 154–55, a literary biography from which much in this entry's pages is derived.
  7. ^ Collected prose / By Paul Celan, Rosemarie Waldrop
  8. ^ Anderson, Mark A. (December 31, 2000). "A Poet at War With His Language". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2009. 
  9. ^ from "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen", p. 34, in Celan's Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986. Cf.: "Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. 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." from Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose, p. 395.
  10. ^ Felstiner, op. cit., p. 56.
  11. ^ a b Enzo Rostagno "Paul Celan et la poésie de la destruction" in "L'Histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels", Les Éditions du Cerf 1997 (ISBN 2-204-05562-X), in French.
  12. ^ The Correspondence of Paul Celan & Ilana Shmueli, The Sheep Meadow Press, New York, Letter 99', PP103-104
  13. ^ http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2002/Jun02/Birtwistle.htm

External links[edit]

Selected Celan exhibits, sites, homepages on the web

Selected poetry, poems, poetics on the web (English translations of Celan)

Selected multimedia presentations

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