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Paul Celan
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Paul
Celan
(1920-70), the pseudonym of Paul Antschel,
was born in Czernovitz,
in Romania, of German-speaking Jewish parents, on November
23, 1920. He could speak Romanian, Russian and Yiddish,
but studied medicine in Paris, intending to become a doctor.
War intervened and Celan returned to Romania, where his
parents
died under the Nazi occupation, and Celan was interned for
18 months before escaping to the Red Army. In 1945 he moved
to Bucharest, working there as translator and reader in
a publishing house, and meeting many prominent writers.
1948 found Celan in Paris, where he took his Licence
des Lettres in 1950, and married the graphic artist
Gisele de Lestrange in 1952, with whom he had a son in 1955.
His first collection of poems attracted little attention,
but his second, Mohn und Gedaechtnis (Poppy and Memory),
which dealt with the Holocaust,
made his reputation.
Celan became Reader in German Language and Literature at
L'École Normal Superieure, a position he held until
his death, by suicide, in 1970. Celan's later poems became
briefer and more fragmentary, but also extremely well known.
Equally famous
were his translations from the French (Valéry, Char,
Michaux), Russian (Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva)
English (Dickinson, Frost, Shakespeare) and Portuguese (Pessoa).
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Celan's
poetry |
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Celan
spoke for many after the Holocaust, for numbness, disbelief
at events, for helplessness in the face of such horror.
And he came to prominence when Existentialism was questioning
the central strands of European thought. Man was now an
absurd animal. War had shown both the Enlightenment's belief
in progress, and Romanticism's trust in the human heart
to be dangerous fictions. Heidegger
took language apart to expose two millennia of evasion,
finding anxiety and dread in place of the eternal verities.
Celan's surrealistic/expressionist poetry was also fragmentary,
repetitive and questioning, built of striking images that
were eloquent and mystifying. Still emotionally evocative,
they became more opaque in later poems, and Celan's readership
dropped off. Celan's was a quiet
personality, probably tortured by the past. His birthplace,
Czernowitz, had come under Soviet rule, and the German spoken
so confidently at home was the language
of a people who had murdered his parents and millions like
them. Celan still wrote in German, but it was now a reworked,
enigmatic
and
self-questioning German, lapsing into silence or repeating
itself like a psalm
that will reveal its meaning only with harsh
experience, in the eternity of God's time. The reworking
of language, and what truth
it may carry, are themes of much literary theory and postmodernist
poetry.
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Modern German
poetry |
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After the defeat of Nazism, German
poetry
sought
in three ways to reunite itself with mainstream European
culture. First was through the nihilism common at the time:
Gottfried
Benn
(1886-1956), the even more stripped down matter of factness
of Günter
Eich
(1907-72) and the halting dialogue with history and the
concentration camps of Celan himself. The second approach
was via nature, through a landscape that was now banal,
derelict and speaking of a degraded humanity: Karl
Krolow
(b. 1915), Peter
Huchel
(1917-65) and Johannes
Bobrowski
(1903-81). The third approach was more radical: the political
expressionism of Bertold
Brecht
(1898-1956), which came to fruition after 1970, when the
self-sufficient poem no longer seemed viable. Erich
Fried
(b. 1921) and Wolf
Biermann
(b.1936) are important names, to be followed by Walter
Höllerer
(b. 1922) and Peter
Handke
(b. 1942) who created unassuming and sometimes discursive
poems that were open to experience: the new subjectivity.
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Reading the German |
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Celan
has been much
translated,
often
very
successfully:
poem
hunter, Schiller
institute, kirjasto,
norton
poets, and in book form: Evidence
of Fire (1989) I. Fairley's Fathomsuns and Benighted,
Penguin Book of German Verse (1957), Modern German
Poetry (1962), East German Poetry (1972) and
German Poetry 1910-75 (1976). German
corner is a good site for German poetry. Many readers
will have learned German at school, and these sites offer
excellent resources: german
language web exercises, and Colonel
Craig's links. The international Goethe
Institutes teach German, and German learning courses
can also be obtained on CD,
cassette
and elsewhere.
German speakers will find these sites useful:Shearsmith,
Die
Todesfuge, Paul
Celan, FU
Berlin, German
Links, Sammlung,
world
poetry yahoo
and google.
For literary criticism on Celan and post war German
poetry see: M. Hamburger's After the Second Flood
(1986) and J. Rolleston's Narratives of Ecstasy: Romantic
Temporality in Modern German Poetry (1987), P.J. Thomson's
An Introduction to Modern German Poetry (1975) and
H. Bloom's Modern German Poetry (1989). As ever,
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(1993) provides useful summaries and references.
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