- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
Paul Celan grew up in Czernowitz, a multilingual city then in Romania, and began writing poetry as a schoolboy. In 1938 he travelled to Tours in France to study medicine, passing through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded. He returned home in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages, and his university studies there also included English.
In July 1941 German and Romanian forces occupied Czernowitz, and the German SS unit and its Romanian allies set the city's Great Synagogue on fire. In October the Jews of the city were forced into a ghetto. There, in the most frightening circumstances, the young Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets and continued to write his own poetry. Before the ghetto was dissolved that autumn, he was pressed into forced labour, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office and then gathering and destroying Russian books.
Worse followed. In June 1942 his parents were deported to an internment camp in Transnistria, where both died, and Celan was held in labour camps until February 1944. When he returned to Czernowitz he resumed his studies, this time of English, at the university.
Celan never lost his devotion to Shakespeare. Decades later, as an established poet living in Paris, he returned to the sonnets, and in 1967 he published his German translations of 21 of them. It was one of several major translation projects, alongside his versions of Rimbaud, Valéry, Mandelstam and the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, whose poems followed in 1968. He also translated other poets writing in English, among them Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Robert Frost and Marianne Moore.
The Deutsche Biographie notes that Celan regarded his self-chosen translations as a genuine part of his own work. His Shakespeare sonnets show a poet carrying a love of English verse from a wartime ghetto into his mature work, and they are now studied alongside his own poems as part of the growing research on his translations.
Why it matters
Celan's Shakespeare translations show how great literature sustained him through persecution, and they enriched German poetry.
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 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 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 Wikipedia
- Celan, Paul Deutsche Biographie
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