Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina.
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. 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. But in 1970,
his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. This
landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose.
All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages.
John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in
Celan's life and work. John Bayley wrote in the New York Review of
Books, "Felstiner translates ... brilliantly."