Paul Celan

Paul Celan was one of the most significant poets of the German language and, according to George Steiner, perhaps the greatest European poet of the post-war period. He was born in 1920 to Jewish parents in Czernowitz, a small town in the German-speaking Bukovina region of Romania, which was devastated by the Germans during the war, and his parents were exterminated. Celan was sent to a "forced labor" camp until the Russian occupation of Romania in 1944. He lived in Bucharest, where he briefly mingled with Romanian surrealists, but faced issues with the Stalinist regime, forcing him to flee to Vienna and then to Paris. He spent most of his creative years in France, where he lived as a poet and simultaneously worked as a linguistics lecturer. A multilingual creator, he passionately pursued the profession of translation, translating, among others, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, and Emily Dickinson. His first poetry book, titled "Poppy and Memory" (or "Opium and Memory," according to the 1983 translation by A. Trifyllis), was published in Germany in 1952. The collection "From Threshold to Threshold," dedicated to his wife, the French engraver Gisele Lestrange, was his second book, released in 1955. Celan committed suicide in 1970 at the age of 50 by jumping into the Seine.