Breathturn paul celan biography

Paul Celan. Conversation in the Mountains prose The Meridian Speech talk. Authority control databases : National Germany. Hidden category: All stub articles. Toggle the table of contents. First edition Suhrkamp Verlag, He committed suicide inhaving spent time in forced labor camps during the war. He has been described as surrealist because his poems use language and draw together images in ways that challenge the reader to make sense of them.

Breathturn paul celan biography: Breathturn (German: Atemwende) is the first

After the war, Celan briefly remained in Romanian citizenship, working as a publisher and translator. However, the political climate and lingering anti-Semitism in Romania prompted him to emigrate to Vienna in Facing Soviet occupation in Austria, he relocated to Paris inwhere he spent the rest of his life. In Paris, Celan devoted himself to writing and translating.

He published several acclaimed poetry collections, including "Sand from the Urns""From Threshold to Threshold"and "Breathturn into Timespan" Celan's unique poetic style, characterized by fragmented lines and complex imagery, explored themes of loss, trauma, and the search for meaning amidst suffering. InCelan traveled to ToursFrance, to study medicine ; [ 5 ] the Anschluss precluded his study in Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly imposed Jewish quota.

His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of Kristallnacht unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees murdered at Birkenau.

Breathturn paul celan biography: Atemwende, (translated into English

Following the Soviet occupation of Bukovina in Junedeportations to Siberia started. A year later, following the reconquest by Romania, Nazi Germany and the then-fascist Romanian regime brought ghettosinternment, and forced labour see Romania in World War II. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated Shakespeare 's sonnets and continued to write his own poetry.

Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying Russian books. The local mayor, Traian Popovicistrove to mitigate the harsh circumstances, until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June Celan hoped to convince his parents to leave the country so as to escape certain persecution.

While Celan was away from home, on 21 Junehis parents were taken from their home and sent by train to an internment camp in Transnistria Governoratewhere two-thirds of the deportees eventually perished. Celan's father likely perished of typhus and his mother was shot after being exhausted by forced labour. Later that year, after being taken to a labour camp in RomaniaCelan received reports of his parents' deaths.

There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their deaths. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms.

It was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name. Upon the emergence of the communist regime in Romania at the beginning ofCelan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended Ingeborg Bachmannwho had just completed a dissertation on Martin Heidegger.

Breathturn paul celan biography: Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at

Celan, however, found only a ruined city divided between Allied powers and which bore little resemblance to the literary, musical, and cultural mecca it had been as the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Furthermore, the urbane, cultured, and sophisticated Viennese Jewish community described by Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday had been largely annihilated by the Holocaust in Austria.

This is why, like the poet Heinrich Heine before him, Celan emigrated to Paris in It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young singer and anti-Nazi Dutch Resistance veteran who had witnessed her husband of just a few months being tortured to death. She visited Celan twice in Paris between and InCelan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to West Germany [ 6 ] where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of the hugely influential Group 47 literary group.

When Ingeborg Bachmannwith whom Celan had an affair, won the group's prize instead for her poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit The Extended HoursCelan whose work had received only six votes said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name". During the following 18 years they wrote over letters; Celan's active correspondents also included Hermann Lenz and his wife Hanne.

He was a close friend of Nelly Sachswho later won the Nobel Prize for literature. Celan became a French citizen in and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Gollunjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work. Celan drowned in the river Seine in Paris around 20 April In addition to writing poetry in German and, earlier, in Romanianhe was an extremely active translator and polyglottranslating literature from Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and English into German.

Meanwhile, Celan's own poetry became progressively more cryptic, fractured and monosyllabic, often deviating from conventional poetic meter and verse structures.