Writing is an act of self-definition, a way of making visible something that is within us.īut writing also falsifies. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E. We can recognize our interiority, share it with others, see it in a way we had not seen it before. It gives shape to the inchoate within us.
It is one of the strengths of writing, of poetry. There is always a residue, when we speak or write, of all that we have left out because we do not have adequate words, or because a choice to write this means that we do not write that. For how does one express or attempt to explain the inexplicable? Every poet confronts this question, since poetry puts into words what we might call ‘felt experience.’ It gives a verbal shape to what the poet has experienced, which although she or he can attempt to communicate it with words, is actually somehow before and beneath words. He began by writing a poem known widely – for most people, it is the only Celan poem they know – called “ Death Fugue,” which as is title implies is a ‘musical’ verbal interweaving of images of the destruction wrought in the concentration camps.īut that poem was, perhaps, too straightforward, too comprehensible. That experience, including both the loss of his parents and, as my former colleague Raul Hilberg termed it, “the destruction of the European Jews,” was the defining point of his life and the focus, in my view, of his poetry. So Celan was a survivor of the Holocaust, or as it is called in Hebrew, the Shoah. Unlike most of his Jewish compatriots, Celan survived the war and the Nazi regime and moved to Bucharest, then Vienna, then Paris. Celan, away when his parents were deported, was himself sent to a labor camp, where he learned the fate of his parents. His mother, exhausted by hard labor, was shot and killed. His father died in the camp, likely of typhoid fever. When Hitler and the Nazis moved eastward, his parents were imprisoned in a forced labor camp. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then Romania, now the Ukraine), he wrote in German.
Paul Celan was the son of Jewish parents.
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