Paul Celan (1920–1970)

Paul Celan was the most commonly-used pseudonym of Paul Antschel, born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernăuți (Czernovitz) in a region that was then in Romania and is now in Ukraine. In 1938, he went to France to study medicine but returned to his hometown in 1939 to study literature and Romance languages. Following the invasion of Germany in World War II, Jews were forced into a ghetto, where Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets and continued to write his own poetry. He was pressed into forced labor and then sent to a labor camp; he was separated from his parents, who were deported by the Nazis to a concentration camp and perished. Celan was imprisoned for 18 months until February 1944, when the advance of the Red Army forced the Romanians to abandon the camps. He returned to Cernăuţi and then went to Bucharest, where he was active in the Jewish literary community. He went to Vienna, where he published his first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns (1948), and had a love affair with Ingeborg Bachmann. In Paris, he met and married in 1952 Gisèle de Lestrange, a graphic artist, with whom he had two children. He worked as a teacher of German language and literature at the École Normale Supérieure, and produced a large number of translations from six different languages, helping to popularize the works of Osip Mandelstam and Paul Valéry, among others. Many of his own poems contain references to historical and political events; his famous poem "Death Fugue," which appears in many anthologies, captures the horror of the Holocaust. He received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960. He became depressed and committed suicide by drowning in the Seine in 1970. Today Celan is widely regarded as one of the most compelling poets of the second half of the 20th century.