Paul Celan
A Life
Anna Arno author Soren Gauger translator
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Publishing:26th Jun '26
£29.95
This title is due to be published on 26th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
[A] sensitive portrayal of the magisterial poet and Holocaust survivor…A thoughtful, well-crafted life of a man once hailed as the 'greatest living poet in the German language.’ * Kirkus 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
Anna Arno's richly detailed account of Paul Celan's life illuminates the contexts of the achingly modern poems that made him an indelible poet of the Holocaust, and perhaps his century's most haunting ghost. -- Mark Doty
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' ('Deathfugue'), and his later, more radical work are not only acts of grief but acts of resistance: attempts to reforge the German language after Auschwitz, to speak the unspeakable. -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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
ISBN: 9780674298637
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 29mm
Weight: 807g
416 pages