Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has argued that this kind of aestheticization of a whole country was precisely the program that led to the Holocaust. This was a feat that Nazi Germany was particularly good at. Anything different would have been to use language as a silk sheet to cover spilled blood and broken bones. His poetry does violence to language, chopping and dislocating it, because this violence was Celan’s reality. That is one reason why he had to make a new language for himself, a language at once probing and groping, critical and innovative.” His German could not and must not be the German of his destroyers. “What is certain is that he both loved and mistrusted words to a degree that has to do with his anomalous position as a poet born in a German-speaking enclave that had been destroyed by Germans. Could Celan be a model for our language of lament in the light of American violence and oppression? Michael Hamburger, one of Celan’s most prominent English translators, writes: This paradox is the cradle of Celan’s poetry, which comes out as language that tears at itself, and as image under immense pressure. He wrote as one who was oppressed, yet he wrote in the language of the oppressor. Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.Paul Celan was a German-Jewish poet who moved to Paris in light of the Holocaust.

'Death is a Master from Germany', Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). His parents were killed in the Holocaust the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

Paul celan poems in english