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Anna Arno examines the life and work of the man who wrote some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century
Anna Arno examines the life and work of the man who wrote some of the greatest poetry of the 20th centuryPaul Celan was born in 1920 to a German-speaking Jewish family in what had until recently been the city of Czernowitz, on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
By then it had become part of Romania, known as Cernauti. After the second World War it became part of the Soviet Union, and is now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Celan went to Hebrew school, spoke Romanian and learned French and Russian. But German was the language in which he would write some of the greatest poetry of the 20During the war the Nazis murdered and deported many of the Jews in Chernivtsi, including Celan’s family.
He survived by hiding in a labour camp. His relationship with German was complex. After all, as he pointed out, his mother tongue had murdered his mother. After the war he went to Bucharest and started his literary career.
In 1947 people smugglers helped him across the border and he reached Vienna, where he met many German-language writers, and published in German. But Paris was his destination, and he got there in 1949. It would be his home for the next 20 years. Celan’s early work was criticised for being hermetic and difficult.
But Celan insisted that he was a realist. The apparent difficulty arose from his attempt to push language to its limits to say the unspeakable. In his most famous poem, Deathfugue, he writes: “ ... as smoke you’ll rise on the air/then you’ll have a grave in the sky. ” As Anna Arno acutely points out, this is not a metaphor.
For the Dead Remember: The Life of MR James by Darryl Jones – Horror upon horror, from public school to the pageDespite this, his work would later be acclaimed in Germany, and he visited it often for readings and awards. But he was never at home in what he called “the land of the perpetrators”. His final years in Paris were difficult.
He was hospitalised for long periods after psychotic episodes and eventually took his own life in the Seine on April 20th, 1970. This magisterial biography was written in Polish, and this background gives Arno special insights into the complexities of the eastern European bloodlands, and it is unlikely to be bettered. It is an essential introduction to the poetry of a man who is now seen as one of the big figures of the 20th century.
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