- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
Paul Celan saw his translations as a genuine part of his own work. He chose the poets he translated himself, and he was an extraordinary linguist, translating into German from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and English. His bond with Russian literature began in Czernowitz, where the Soviet occupation of 1940–1941 brought Russian studies at the university and his first contact with Russian modernism. In Bucharest after the war he translated Russian writers such as Chekhov and Lermontov into Romanian.
One of his most important projects was a volume of poems by Osip Mandelstam. Born in Warsaw in 1891 to a Polish-Jewish family, Mandelstam was one of the foremost poets of the Acmeist school in Russia, for which he wrote the manifesto, and he published his first collection, The Stone, in 1913. In the 1930s he was arrested and sent into internal exile, and under interrogation he admitted writing an epigram mocking Stalin that he had only ever recited to friends. Arrested again, he was sentenced in 1938 to five years in a labour camp and died on 27 December 1938 at the Vtoraya Rechka transit camp near Vladivostok.
Celan's German versions, Ossip Mandelstamm: Gedichte, were published in 1959. Like Mandelstam, Celan was a Jewish poet whose life had been shattered by a totalitarian regime, and in Die Niemandsrose (1963) Celan's own poems turned toward Jewish and Russian themes.
Mandelstam was only one of many. Celan's book-length translations began with Arthur Rimbaud and Alexander Blok (both 1958), followed by Paul Valéry's 'The Young Fate' (1960) and the poems of Sergei Yesenin (1961). In 1967 he published German versions of 21 of Shakespeare's sonnets, and in 1968 poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti. He also translated Henri Michaux, René Char and Fernando Pessoa.
Since about 2000, encouraged by a 1997 exhibition at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Celan's translations have become one of the main subjects of research on his work, studied as poems in their own right.
Why it matters
Celan's translations introduced German readers to Mandelstam and other great poets, building bridges between literatures.
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 taught German at the École normale supérieureFrom 1959 until his death in 1970, Paul Celan taught German language and literature at France's elite École normale supérieure.
- 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
- Celan, Paul Deutsche Biographie
- Paul Celan Wikipedia
- Osip Mandelstam Wikipedia
- Paul Celan Academy of American Poets
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