PAUL CELAN

Sensitive portrayal of the magisterial poet and Holocaust survivor.

Paul Celan—his pseudonym an anagram of Ancel, a “Romanized version of Antschel,” his family name—was born in a place that, writes biographer Arno, no longer exists, “and not only because any place changes after decades.” Chernivtsi’s buildings still stand in the Ukrainian town, “stunted by decades of Soviet rule,” but its people are different. Gone are the Jews, gone are the German-speaking burghers. Celan’s family died at Nazi hands, but he himself managed to survive as an enslaved laborer, miraculously escaping deportation and death. Though the town was Romanian-speaking and though he knew many languages (including English, translating Shakespeare), he was foremost a speaker of and writer in German. That would not change even after the war, when his mature poetry began to appear while he lived in self-imposed exile in Paris. Although an immigration official “doubted if publishing poems in German was a suitable pastime for an assimilated French writer,” Celan attempted to reclaim the language from the years of totalitarianism, even though the “tongue of his mother (Muttersprache) was also that of her murderers (Mördersprache).” He also worked to strip the language to the bone, striving to communicate with absolute clarity while lamenting that German readers “preferred to see the poems as…difficult, encrypted, surreal, and so forth.” As Arno chronicles, Celan was well-known and praised, and he engaged with the likes of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and René Char. Yet, he was psychically shattered. And one particularly malicious literary feud, as well as a growing paranoia and a very real awareness of the persistence of antisemitism, helped push him over the edge: In 1970, at age 49, he drowned himself in the Seine after underlining a passage in a biography of Friedrich Hölderlin: “Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the ­bitter well of his heart.”

A thoughtful, well-crafted life of a man once hailed as the “greatest living poet in the German language.”