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Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth

Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth

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Paul Celan: A Biography of His Youth

Hardcover(1st U.S. ed)

$24.95

Hardcover(1st U.S. ed)
$24.95

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Product Details

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892551620
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	11/28/1991
Edition description:	1st U.S. ed
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

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Editorial Reviews

Poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) experienced tremendous guilt because he survived a Nazi labor camp while his German-Jewish parents were murdered. Only after their deaths did a strong Jewish element work its way into the Rumanian-born poet's luminous verses. Chalfen--a Jewish native of Rumanian Bukovina, as was Celan--has pieced together a valuable portrait of the poet's early years, drawing on interviews and correspondence with friends and relatives. This quietly moving biography traces Celan's break from his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, his sojourn in Paris, young love for actress Ruth Lackner and flight from communist Rumania to Vienna in 1947. The book includes numerous poems, some translated into English for the first time, which Chalfen anchors to specific incidents in Celan's life and to a variety of influences from Rilke to Yiddish folk song. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Celan is considered one of the German language's finest postwar poets. This biography conjures up the lost Jewish community of Czernowitz in the formerly Austrian province of Bukovina, where the poet was born as Paul Antschel, and traces its nearly incomprehensible fate under first Rumanian, then Soviet suzerainty. The painstaking re-creation of Celan's familial and personal relationships considerably clarifies the interpretation of his imagery, which, although striking, is often so personal as to be inaccessible. The ``Einhorn'' addressed in the poem ``Shibboleth,'' for example, is not a ``unicorn,'' as it has previously been translated into English, but refers to Erich Einhorn, a friend of the poet's youth. Recommended reading not only for the poet's admirers but also for anyone interested in the vanished polyglot world of Eastern Europe.-- Michael T. O'Pecko, Towson State Univ., Md.

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