![]() ![]() This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. Self-exited in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had 'passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech' His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote 'Todesfuge' ('Death-fugue'), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. ![]() Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. ![]() John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work. All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages. ![]() Self-exiled in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. ![]()
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