- Person
- Paul Celan
- Lived
- 1920–1970
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- Romanian-born French
The story
When the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon their labour camps in February 1944, Paul Celan returned to Czernowitz, where he worked briefly as a nurse in a mental hospital and studied English at the university. The city was now part of the Soviet Union, and as a Jew he came under pressure to resettle in Romania. Considering emigration to Palestine, he left for Bucharest in April 1945 and remained there until 1947.
In Bucharest he worked as a reader and translator for Cartea Rusă, a publisher of Russian literature, translating writers such as Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Lermontov into Romanian. He was active in the city's Jewish literary community and became friends with many leading Romanian writers. The literary scene was rich in surrealists, among them Gellu Naum, Ilarie Voronca, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun and Dolfi Trost, and he also met the poets Rose Ausländer and Immanuel Weissglas.
He published poems and translations under several pseudonyms, inventing names for his friends as well as himself. In 1947 he settled on Celan, an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his surname. That May his friend Petre Solomon's Romanian translation of 'Todesfuge' appeared as 'Tangoul Morţii' ('Death Tango'), the first poem printed under the new name. Germany's Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that in this post-war surrealist milieu Celan developed a new poetic language, publishing in German and in Romanian translation, and he also wrote some poems in Romanian.
At the end of 1947, as Romania came under Stalinist rule, he fled through Budapest to Vienna, and in 1948 he moved on to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Celan grew up speaking several languages, including Romanian, Russian and French, and also understood Yiddish. His Bucharest years launched a lifetime of translation: he would go on to translate into German from eight languages, from Romanian and Russian to Hebrew and English.
Why it matters
Celan's early translations began a career that carried literature across many languages and borders.
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 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'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
- Paul Celan Wikipedia
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