Under Romanian control at the time, that territory had previously belonged to Poland, and was to come first under Russian, then German and, after World War II, once again Russian control. Paul Antschel (in Romanian spelled Ancel, which the budding poet changed into the anagramatic Celan) was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina in 1920. And Celan's correspondence with Nelly Sachs gives us some important firsthand clues to the troubled psyche of the perennial exile who ended his own life at the age of 49. John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew goes an even longer way to prove the third point and helps us through our difficulties with the poems.
Israel Chalfen's invaluable book, Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth goes a long way towards correcting and refining the first and second points. Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.Viewed through the wrong end of the telescope Paul Celan is that Romanian-Jewish poet who, though serving in labor camps, kept on writing enigmatic verse in German, and committed suicide by drowning in the Seine. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). His parents were killed in the Holocaust the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.
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