About the Author

Paul Celan, now widely acknowledged as one the most important poets of the twentieth century, built a poetic vocabulary with which to express, slowly and painfully, the losses he had endured: his parents, victims of the Nazi death-camps; his fellow Jews of Europe; his native country, Romania, from which he fled the Stalinist takeover; and the poetic language, German, which had been so thoroughly corrupted and misused by the Third Reich. His reconstituting of German as a literary language, along with other writers like Gunter Eich and Nelly Sachs, remains one of the most redemptive acts of our time. He died in 1970.