Creator Bio
Paul Celan
1920–1970
A major twentieth-century poet and translator, Paul Celan (born Antschel; Celan is an anagram of his original name) was born in the multicultural city of Czernowitz, Bukovina, the son of German-speaking Jews. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938, and returned to Romania before the outbreak of World War II. His parents died in Nazi labor camps and Celan was interned for eighteen months. After the war, establishing himself as a poet, he lived in Bucharest. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature and in 1960 earned the Büchner Prize from the German Academy of Language and Literature. Celan took his own life, as did a number of other notable survivors of the Holocaust.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Black Flakes
Snow has fallen, with no light. A month
has gone by now or two, since autumn in its monkish cowl
brought tidings my way, a leaf from Ukrainian slopes:
“Remember it’s wintry here too, for the…
Primary Source
Todesfuge (1944–45)
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped
A man lives in…