Paul Celan

Paul Celan was the most frequently used pseudonym of Paul Antschel (the pseudonym adopts an anagram of his surname in Romanian, Ancel) (November 23, 1920 – approximately April 20, 1970), who is considered one of the few major poets of the post-World War II era. He was born in Romania, lived in Austria and later in France, and wrote in German. In additional to the composition of his poetry, he was an extremely active translator, translating literature from Romanian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and English into German.

Celan Poetry Universe

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:

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"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."

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Death camps - Adorno - Auschwitz

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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."

Related Topics:
Webern - German language

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