 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
Paul Celan (1920-1970) - pseudonym for Paul Antschel | |
|
Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Romania, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). "A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could was up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something." Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel, the only child of German-speaking Jewish parents in Cernauti, in Bukovina, a part of northern Romania (earlier Czernowitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Chernovtsy, Ukraine). Bukovina held speakers of Ukrainian, Romanian, German, Swabian, and Yiddish. It was relatively free from religious discrimination; nearly half of the inhabitants of Czernowitz were Jews – the city was called "Little Vienna." Celan's parents spoke German at home and with his mother, Fritzi, Celan shared a passion for German poetry; especially the influence of the Romantic tradition from Novalis to Rilke is seen in his early verse. At the age of six, Celan entered a liberal, German-language elementary school and he was then sent to a Hebrew school, the Safah Ivriah. After his bar mitzvah in 1933, Celan joined an anti-Fascist youth group, which published a mimeographed Marxist magazine called Red Student. Celan studied medicine in Paris in 1938 and then Romance philology at the University of Czernowitz. The Russians invaded Bukovina in 1940 and two years later the Nazis started to deport Jews to labor camps. His parents refused to go into hiding and they were taken to death camps, where they died afterward. According to some sources, Celan's father died of typhus and his mother was killed by a shot in the back of the neck. During World War II Celan, a Jew, was sent to a forced-labour camp, where he worked until heavy snow forced it to close. Celan managed to survive the Holocaust, although he was imprisoned until 1943. When the Russian Army reinvaded his homeland in 1944, Celan went to Bucharest, where he continued reading such great German lyric poets as Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke. A year after receiving the news of his parent's deaths, Celan wrote: ''And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time, / the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?'' Celan had lost his mother, and his German mother tongue, the Muttersprache, reminded him of the loss constantly. Like many Central European Jews, Celan had viewed Germany as a nation of writers and thinkers. Celan changed his name to Paul Aurel, then to Paul Ancel, and finally to Paul Celan. In Bucharest he worked as a translators and editor at an publishing company. In 1947 he went to Vienna and immigrated next year to Paris, where he became a teacher of German language at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 1952 Celan married the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, a non-Jew. They had met in Paris in 1951 and during the following 19 years they wrote over 700 letters. The correspondence, edited by their son Eric Celan, was published in 2002. Celan's and Ingeborg Bachmann's Poetische Korrespondenzen came out in 1997. Gisèle Celan-Lestrange knew about their love affair, but although it caused her much pain, she eventually accepted it. Celan's Vienna poems mostly address Bachmann. At that time she was writing a dissertation on Heidegger. Throughout her life, Bachmann evoked the figure of Celan, in both her fiction and non-fiction. Celan established his reputation first in West Germany. His first poems started to appear in the periodicals in the late 1940s. His second book, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952, Poppy and Memories), which included Todesfugue, gained wide acclaim and made the author as an important poet of the Holocaust. Todesfugue, Celan's most famous poem, describes with nightmarish, surrealistic images the Jewish experience under Nazism. It begins with the lines (tr. by Jerome Rothenberg) ''Black milk of morning we drink at you at dusktime / we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night / we drink and drink / we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie /' (Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends / wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sic nachts...) Death is a gang-boss aus Deutchland his eye is blue Celan's friends René Char, Nelly Sachs, and other poets felt the restrictions placed on them by their identity, the "death-bringing speech", and by the history that the Holocaust represented. As Celan once said, language must be set free from the history. "I went with my very being toward language," he once said. In the 1950s Celan's work was becoming known for its broken syntax and radical minimalism, expressing his perception of the shattered world in which he lived. Celan concentrated on transformg silence into words, or circumscribe its boundaries. When he received the Bremen Prize for German literature he explained: "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." Die Niemandsrose (1963) marked Celan's return to the theme of the meaningless of human suffering, in which the "clubfoot of the gods" stumbles over mountains of corpses. Ein Nichts When Claire Goll, whom was married to the poet Yvan Goll's, accused Celan of plagiarizing some of his husband's work, Celan suffered a nervous breakdown. He had translated some of Goll's poems but the accusations lived from the 1950s to 1960s. He had also translated works from such writers as Cocteau, Michaux, Mandelstam, Ungaretti, Pessoa, Rimbaud, Valéry, Char, du Bouchet, and Dupin. In 1960 Celan received Georg Büchner Prize. He suffered from bouts of depression throughout the 1960s. "Celan is sick – hopelessly," said the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who met the poet in 1967. Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and after the war he was forbidden to teach for some years. He never openly apologized his past. Celan had studied thoroughly Heidegger's major work, Being and Time (1927) and in 1957 he had wanted to send him the poem 'Schlieren'. Heidegger had followed Celan's work since the 1950s and had long wished to meet him. After reading at Freiburg University Celan visited Heidegger's famous cabin in Todtnauberg, but what they talked about is unknown. Celan's entry in the logbook was ambiguous: "Into the cabin logbook, with a view toward the Brunnenstern, with hope of a coming word in the heart." However, Celan left Freiburg in high spirits, and wrote the poem 'Todtnauberg' with the lines: "a hope, today, / of a thinking man's / coming (un- / tarryingly coming) / word / in the heart." Celan's relation to Judaism was complicated. He drew from the heritage of European Symbolism, but his work was rooted in the Jewish-Hasidic tradition, he often brought Jewish themes into his work, and he wrote also in Hebrew some ''pained scrawlings'', apparently during a month-long psychiatric stay in 1965. A year before his death, Celan visited Israel, where he met Ilana Shmueli, his childhood friend and last great love. Celan died by his own hand: he drowned himself in Seine on May 1, in 1970, at the age of 49. In his pocket calendar he had written: "Depart Paul." Before his death Heidegger had planned to guide him through the Hölderlin landscape of the Upper Danube. The three books Celan left unfinished at his death appeared in 1986 under the title Last Poems For further reading: Paul Celan's Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space by Charlotte Ryland (2010); Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951-1970 by James K. Lyon (2006); Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan by Ulrich Baer (2000); Encyclopedia of World Literature, vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Martin Heidegger by R. Safranski (1998); Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner (1995); The Art of Hunger by Paul Auster (1992); Erinnerungen an Paul Celan by Gerhart Baumann (1992); Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth by I. Chalfen (1991); Paul Celan by Amy Colin (1991); Geschichts- und sozialkritische Dimensionen in Paul Celans Werk by L.A. Pretzer (1980); Paul Celan: Magie der Form by W. Menninghaus (1980); Vom Engagement absoluter Poesie by M. Janz (1976); Über Paul Celan by D. Meinecke (1973) - Suom.: Runo Kuolemanfuuga (Totesfugue) on ilmestynyt suomeksi Parnassossa 1959 ja muita runoja teoksessa Niin kuin kivelle puhutaan (1993), suom. Jukka Koskelainen. Holocaust, see also: Elie Wiesel, Nelly Sachs Selected works:
|
