Verse From the Abyss

Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno, translated by Soren Gauger; Belknap Press, 416pp., $35

Paul Celan, perhaps foremost among postwar German-language poets, was born in 1920 in the Romanian city of Cernăuți and died in Paris 50 years later. His was not a long life, though other poets whose work continues to fascinate scholars and readers alike—John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, to name a few—died even younger. That most of those readers who sing Celan’s praises encounter his work in translation testifies to the import of translators but also says something about the impossibility of reading certain poets, Celan among them, through a nonbiographical lens. Which is to say: Many people have heard of Celan, but far fewer have read him. Anna Arno, an award-winning Polish writer and critic, does little to dismantle Celan’s legend as a Jewish poet haunted by the deaths of his parents in the Holocaust—she’s clearly a fan—but instead fleshes out the man behind the poems and the bygone milieu he inhabited, one in which poets and poetry mattered.

Celan’s birth name was Paul Anschel. (His nom de plume is an anagram of the Romanian spelling of his last name: Ancel.) He took his work very seriously and would chafe, as Arno repeatedly reminds us, whenever people called his work hermetic or self-important. Yet, in the 1960s, he distanced himself from “Todesfuge” (or “Death fugue”), an early poem that had played a major role in establishing his literary reputation in Germany and other countries. For him, the work embodied the risks associated with writing about the Holocaust: that over time such haunted, harrowing verse could be transformed into a pretty, melodic poem that people actually enjoyed. He refused to recite “Todesfuge” at his public readings despite audience requests. This suggests several things that keep cropping up whenever Celan’s work is discussed, mainly how to write about the Holocaust without aestheticizing it and the stance survivors should take toward the perpetrators. Celan, who settled in Paris in 1948 after stints in Bucharest and Vienna, first visited Germany in 1952, and he was to maintain regular contact with German literary figures and publishers for the rest of his life. That some of them had supported Hitler and the Nazis was not lost on him, and the “broken German” of his middle and especially late periods can be seen as an attempt at cleansing his mother tongue of Nazi overtones.

Arno’s 15 erudite chapters, expertly translated by Soren Gauger, recount Celan’s life thematically (his home town, his courtship of his future wife, his mental health, etc.) rather than chronologically, lending the book a lively, even messy, feel. Indeed, that dynamism seems to mirror what’s already known about Celan: namely that he was mercurial, especially in his later years, when the so-called Goll affair (which began in 1953, after Yvan Goll’s widow, Claire, accused Celan of plagiarizing her late husband’s poems) continued to take a toll on Celan’s already fragile mental state. Though he was and remained throughout his life a man of principles—for the most part, he refused to associate with those who had aligned with the Nazis—toward the end of his life he grew paranoid and implacable, lashing out and burning bridges in the process. Even those who championed him and his work, like his erstwhile lover Ingeborg Bachmann, were not spared.

Celan struggled with mental illness, and the death of his parents at the hands of the Nazis cast an impenetrable shadow over his entire life. The depravities he suffered along with millions of other exiles following World War II were intensified by the pervasive, and rekindled, anti-Semitism in postwar France and Germany. His marriage to the graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange, in December 1952, was initially happy, though the couple lost their first child, François, soon after birth (their second son, Eric, lives in Paris). Anyone who has sampled Celan’s surviving correspondence is likely aware of his many extramarital affairs and his three improbable meetings with Martin Heidegger. These are known facts, and Arno presents them in graceful and crisp prose. However, some readers might be surprised to learn that Celan married well, for Gisèle Lestrange came from an aristocratic—and very Catholic—family, and that in time the couple came to own not only a spacious apartment in Paris’s upscale 16th arrondissement, but vacation property as well. Somehow, the image of the wounded, fragile Celan, a Holocaust survivor writing with moral gravitas about the evils of this world, does not square with the idea of Celan as a member of the Parisian bourgeoisie.

As Arno writes Celan acquired a degree of social status, including as an instructor of German at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where Jacques Derrida would see him in the hallways. And yet, because Celan remained faithful to German, his first language, the French literary community did not (with a handful of exceptions) care about his work. Likewise, it took time for his fellow poets and writers in West Germany to accept him and his work. Initially, some of them found him too grandiose, too morally serious. Once they came around, however, the prizes piled on, including the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. His mental health, however, continued to deteriorate. In November 1965, in the grip of a paranoid psychosis, Celan attempted to stab his wife with a knife. She left him a short time later, taking their son Eric with her. Celan never recovered. “It was probably on the night of April 19–20, 1970,” Arno writes, “that Celan jumped or waded into the Seine, not far from Pont Mirabeau.” His body was found days later. And yet, thanks to Arno’s biography, Celan has never felt more real—and more present.