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Poems in the Language of Death

hyperallergic.com · 1,793 words · saved by 1 readers

Paul Celan’s truest homeland, paradoxically, was the German language — the language of the Nazis who imprisoned him in a forced labor camp and murdered his parents. In 1970 Paul Celan published a single line in the Paris journal L’Ephémère: “La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose” — Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself. Exposure resonates throughout Celan’s work: the isolated self, scarified by the horrific forces of history, exposes its wounds to the world in eloquent, gnarled, and deeply troubled word-shards. Celan is the central European poet of his moment, for his work most searchingly registers the malign force of that black hole at the 2oth century’s center — the Holocaust. 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth, to a German-speaking Jewish family in Bukovina (then part of Romania, now Ukraine). It also marked the 50th anniversary of his suicide in the Seine in Paris, where he taught at the École normale supérieur. His truest homeland, paradoxically,

In 1970 Paul Celan published a single line in the Paris journal L’Ephémère : “ La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose ” — Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself . Exposure resonates throughout Celan’s work: the isolated self, scarified by the horrific forces of history, exposes its wounds to the world in eloquent, gnarled, and deeply troubled word-shards. Celan is the central European poet of his moment, for his work most searchingly registers the malign force of that black hole at the 2oth century’s center — the Holocaust. 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of Celan’s birth, to

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