- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
Paul Celan arrived in Paris on 14 July 1948 as a stateless refugee, having fled Romania for Vienna the year before. He studied German philology and general linguistics at the Sorbonne, taking his License ès lettres in 1950, and earned his living as a language teacher and translator.
In November 1951 he met the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, and they married on 21 December 1952. Their son Éric was born in 1955, the year Celan became a French citizen. In early 1956 he worked for a few months as a translator at the International Labour Office in Geneva, and in 1956 and 1957 he stood in as a German lecturer at the École normale supérieure in Saint-Cloud.
In 1959 he took up a post as reader in German language and literature at the École normale supérieure on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, one of France's most prestigious institutions of higher education. He held the position until his death in 1970, teaching French students the language of his own poetry. The post gave him a steady income alongside his writing and translating.
These were also his years of greatest fame. His poems grew shorter and more fragmented, he received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960, and during the 1960s he published more than six books of poetry and gained international renown. He also worked with his wife on artistic projects, such as the cycles Atemkristall and Schwarzmaut, designing bilingual titles for her etchings.
His legacy is still tended at the school where he taught. Celan's literary papers are held by the German Literature Archive in Marbach, while the École normale supérieure is home to the Unité de recherche Paul Celan, a research unit devoted to his work and the contact point for his private papers. His poetry is studied around the world, and scholarly papers on it number in the thousands.
Why it matters
Celan passed on his love of German literature to French students and his legacy continues through research at the school where he taught.
About Paul Celan
Holocaust survivor from Czernowitz whose German-language poems, above all “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue), became the defining poetic witness to the destruction of European Jewry.
More about Paul Celan
- Paul Celan explained how language survived the HolocaustIn his 1958 Bremen Prize speech, Paul Celan said that amid all his losses, language alone had remained within reach.
- Paul Celan brought Osip Mandelstam's poems into GermanIn 1959 Paul Celan published German translations of the poems of Osip Mandelstam, the Jewish poet who died in a Soviet camp.
- Paul Celan translated Shakespeare even in the ghettoConfined in the Czernowitz ghetto in 1941, Paul Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets; in 1967 he published 21 of them in German.
- Paul Celan began his career as a translator in BucharestIn Bucharest from 1945 to 1947, Paul Celan worked as a publishing reader and translator, rendering Chekhov and Lermontov into Romanian.
- Paul Celan's 'Death Fugue' became a defining Holocaust poemPaul Celan's 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), a stark evocation of life in the Nazi camps, became one of the most widely anthologised poems of the Holocaust.
Sources
- Paul Celan Academy of American Poets
- Celan, Paul Deutsche Biographie
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