![]() ![]() ![]() In Germany, he is considered the equal of Rilke and Trakl, the heir of Hölderlin’s metaphysical lyricism elsewhere his work is held in similar esteem, prompting statements such as George Steiner’s recent remark that Celan is “almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.” At the same time, Celan is an exceedingly difficult poet, both dense and obscure he demands so much of a reader, and in his later work his utterances are so gnomic, that it is nearly impossible to take him in at first reading. Paul Celan was a poet of exile, an outsider even to the language of his own poems, and if his life was exemplary in its pain, a paradigm of the destruction and dislocation of mid-century Europe, his poetry is defiantly idiosyncratic. Victim of World War II, survivor of the death camps, suicide before he was fifty. 30P.Ī Jew, born in Rumania, who wrote in German and lived in France. ![]() Translated by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. ![]()
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