biography
| name: |
Celan, Paul
|
| |
originally Paul Antschel
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pronunciation:
[selan]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1920–70)
|
| biography:
| Poet, born in Cschernowszy, Romania, the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. Cschernowszy became a Jewish ghetto in 1941, and Celan's parents were deported to a concentration camp in 1942 while he was sent to a labour camp (1942–4). He moved to Paris in 1948 and took French citizenship. Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), his first collection of poems to be published in Germany, won him immediate acclaim. His poetry, influenced by French Symbolism and Surrealism, is marked by its rich use of imagery and its melodious quality, while dealing with the horrors of life in the ghetto. The haunting beauty of the poem Todesfugue, which he later rejected, has become a synonym for the Holocaust. His later poetry, after the collection Sprachgitter (1959), is less accessible because of its use of coined words, paradox, and broken syntax. He was also a notable translator of Rimbaud, Valéry, Emily Dickinson, and others. Among his awards is the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1960. He committed suicide in 1970. |
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