Paul celan famous poems

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania, to Jewish parents, who spoke German in the home. His mother and father were both deported to concentration camps during Nazi occupation and killed. Celan managed to hide for some time and then survived the war in a Romanian detention camp. After the war, he worked for a time as an editor and translator; he went to Paris to lecture on German literature. Celan began to receive recognition as a poet with the publication of his volume Mohn und Gedachtnis (Poppy and Memory) in 1952 and continued to publish steadily until his suicide in 1970. Divided between conflicting loyalties and cultures, Celan created a unique idiom. Despite the traumatic experience of Nazi occupation, he chose to devote himself to the study of German literature. His poetry is one of the most radical attempts to reconstruct the German language and literature in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

If the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan were a compass point, he would be north. He has long represented a kind of absolute of what poetry is capable of, and stands as an exemplary figure for other poets, many of whom have incorporated aspects of his work into their own. In the postwar years until his suicide in 1970, he extended conceptions of what poetry could be and do, drawing radical conclusions as to what it meant to continue the tradition of the German lyric even though he was using the language of those who had murdered his mother and father and attempted to eradicate his people entirely. It is often assumed that this amounted to a dismantling of German, a way of writing it that worked against its natural proclivities and patterns, but in fact it is at least as accurate to say that Celan worked with and in German, revealing expressive seams and veins that had hitherto lain neglected.

Around 1960 Paul Celan began making notes for a lecture on the “darkness or obscurity of the poetic,” which was soon superseded by his being awarded the 1960 Büchner Prize, Germany’s main liter

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