And can you bear, mother, as once on a time, the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?” wrote the great Romanian poet Paul Celan, in his 1942 poem, The Nearness of Graves, written after his mother was shot dead in a labour camp following a pogrom in Romania during which both his parents were seized. German was the language of his beloved mother. It was also that of the people who murdered both her and her husband.
Yet to write in the language of his parents’ assassins became Celan’s destiny. “I can only speak my truth in my own language,” he admitted in a letter. “This is my fate: to write German poems. And as long as poetry is my fate, I will be happy.”
Happiness is not a state typically associated with Celan, who was born in 1920 in Czernowitz (a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Ukrainian Chernivtsi). During the 1960s he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in Paris, the city which became his home, leading to attempts on his own life and that of his wife, the long-suffering French aristocrat and artist Gisèle Lestrange, whom he frequently betrayed. But Anna Arno, in her deeply researched, comprehensive biography of the greatest German-language poet of the second half of the 20th century, also manages to capture a younger, fun-loving poet who, according to a school friend, “often spoke tongue-in-cheek and was ready to stomach even the crudest of jokes”. In later life, following the Holocaust and an enduring, mendacious campaign by the monstrous French-German author Claire Goll denouncing him as a plagiarist, widely considered to be baseless, he was still capable of answering his critics with Rabelaisian-style scatology. Here is his response to one:
If God doesn’t exist
Then Blöcker…
Will go to heaven
To Hitler masturbating over Eva Braun while she shits
He’ll shit while reading the works of Franz Kafka
Celan was particularly sensitive to criticism of his most famous poem, the Auschwitz-themed Todesfuge, which he saw as his mother’s only grave. Arno prefaces her book with the complete text and calls it his signature poem. But in an episode she does not include, Celan explained to the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai that Death Fugue, his meditation on the collective fate of the Jews, corresponded to an early stage of his work and that he had changed completely as a poet, rarely reading Death Fugue in public. Now, when he published the poem, he reprinted it with an empty page before and an empty page after the poem, as separation. A tougher, harsher voice informed his later poetry:
Eroded by the beamwind of your speech the gaudy chatter of the pseudo- experienced – the hundred- tongued perjury – poem, the noem
In notes for the 1960 Meridian speech, where he outlined his later poetics, Celan wrote, “The poem is the place of the singular, the irreversible ... the cemetery of all synonymics.”
Beauty had ceased to become an objective. “I want truth,” he told a fellow writer. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, wrote Keats. No matter how elliptical and obscure Celan’s poetry became, it retained a beauty that came from the utter authenticity it so wounded him to have put in question.
Celan claimed true poetry is anti-biographical yet declared in a letter, “I haven’t written a single line that isn’t tied to my existence.”
It is impossible to fathom Celan without knowledge of the poetry’s biographical context. A vast amount has been written about him but little biography (John Felstiner’s excellent Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew comes closest).
Arno’s empathy for Celan and mastery of his challenging poetry make for an important contribution to the large corpus of work on this deeply flawed genius.
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno, translated by
Soren Gauger
Harvard University Press
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