Overview

A luminous, groundbreaking biography of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, best known for the poem “Deathfugue.” Paul Celan (1920–1970) was recognized as the greatest poet of the German language shortly before his tragic death just shy of his fiftieth birthday, when he drowned himself in the Seine. He described his “Todesfuge” (“Deathfugue”) as a “tombstone” for his mother, who perished in the Holocaust. Celan’s work is often viewed as a rejoinder to Theodor Adorno’s dictum that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. While the commentary on Celan’s contributions to poetics and Holocaust literature is voluminous, little has been written about his life itself. Anna Arno provides the definitive biography. Paul Celan: A Life follows the poet from his birthplace, Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to Bucharest, where he was part of an important circle of Surrealists; then on to Vienna, where he met and fell in love with Ingeborg Bachmann; and finally to Paris. Although in his final years he was haunted by bouts of mental illness, his life cannot be defined by its implosion. Paul Celan was an ardent, inveterate romantic whose many meaningful relationships left their mark on his poetry. He also cultivated intense, often fraught dialogues with such thinkers as René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Martin Heidegger. Drawing upon a linguistically wide range of archival sources and the most up-to-date research, Arno presents a complete picture of Celan’s life. Here is the essential story of a towering figure in modern poetry.

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Reviews

Celan's multilingual precocity; his good fortune in evading the Nazi death camps; his love affairs with intelligent women, principally with Ingeborg Bachmann; his marriage to the long-suffering Gisèle Lestrange; the campaign of slander launched against him by the widow of Yvan Goll; his embattled relations with Germany, the German language, and his German readership; his exploits as a translator; his embrace of Zionism; his descent into madness and eventual suicide--all these aspects of Celan's life are explored in depth and with sympathy in Anna Arno's exemplary biography.--J. M. Coetzee In this penetrating, fully realized, and unflinching biography, sensitively translated by Soren Gauger, Anna Arno has fleshed out Celan's notoriously spare and difficult poetry with a complete cultural context, so it can reside more deeply and fully in us, his destined readers.--Edward Hirsch A lucid, exquisitely rendered biography. Arno lays bare the tensions that animate Celan's poetry, inviting us to consider why the Jewish polyglot's decision after the Holocaust to write in German--his mother tongue--was a radical act of reclamation.--Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days A sweeping, tragic biography of a poet haunted by history. Arno shows how Celan's most famous poem, 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), and his later, more radical work are not only acts of grief but acts of resistance: attempts to reforge German after Auschwitz, to speak the unspeakable.--Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Celan's multilingual precocity; his good fortune in evading the Nazi death camps; his love affairs with intelligent women, principally with Ingeborg Bachmann; his marriage to the long-suffering Gisèle Lestrange; the campaign of slander launched against him by the widow of Yvan Goll; his embattled relations with Germany, the German language, and his German readership; his exploits as a translator; his embrace of Zionism; his descent into madness and eventual suicide--all these aspects of Celan's life are explored in depth and with sympathy in Anna Arno's exemplary biography.--J. M. Coetzee In this penetrating, fully realized, and unflinching biography, sensitively translated by Soren Gauger, Anna Arno has fleshed out Celan's notoriously spare and difficult poetry with a complete cultural context, so it can reside more deeply and fully in us, his destined readers.--Edward Hirsch A sweeping, tragic biography of a poet haunted by history. Arno shows how Celan's most famous poem, 'Todesfuge' ('Death Fugue'), and his later, more radical work are not only acts of grief but acts of resistance: attempts to reforge German after Auschwitz, to speak the unspeakable.--Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Celan's multilingual precocity; his good fortune in evading the Nazi death camps; his love affairs with intelligent women, principally with Ingeborg Bachmann; his marriage to the long-suffering Gisèle Lestrange; the campaign of slander launched against him by the widow of Yvan Goll; his embattled relations with Germany, the German language, and his German readership; his exploits as a translator; his embrace of Zionism; his descent into madness and eventual suicide--all these aspects of Celan's life are explored in depth and with sympathy in Anna Arno's exemplary biography.""--J. M. Coetzee In this penetrating, fully realized, and unflinching biography, sensitively translated by Soren Gauger, Anna Arno has fleshed out Celan's notoriously spare and difficult poetry with a complete cultural context, so it can reside more deeply and fully in us, his destined readers.--Edward Hirsch

Author Information

Anna Arno is the author of biographies of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Polish writer and activist Konstanty Jeleński. She has also published three short story collections in Polish—Okna [Windows], Ten kraj [This Land], and Ciało [The Body].

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