Lucy Ives reviews two new books: Rosmarie Waldrop’s translation of Celan’s collected prose, Conversation in the Mountains (New Directions), and Anna Arno’s biography Paul Celan: A Life (Belknap). Together they frame a poet whose German was so thoroughly reshaped that it verges on a fictional idiom — a “form of tuning” in agonized dialogue with the other languages of his childhood.
Celan’s biography does the heavy lifting of the essay:
- Born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Bukovina — a multilingual city; his mother spoke a Habsburg High German and was shot in 1942 after being deemed unfit for work
- Todesfuge (“Death Fugue,” 1952) became central to Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung — its “Master” plays with snakes and writes while black milk grinds out the time of the camps
- A professional translator (Mandelstam’s “almonds” hide in his German), he coined words — “threadsuns,” “timefarm,” “snowpart” — and used “Du” to mean I, she, he, they, we
- He drowned in the Seine in 1970, an apparent suicide; his last decade was consumed by the incompleteness of denazification
On the books themselves:
- Waldrop’s collection is mostly occasional prose; Ives finds her introduction thin — no war, no languages, no death — yet the “Backlight” aphorisms are sharp, including the parable of the gravity teacher who floats and is believed but never expected to come down
- Arno’s biography (from the Polish) is nonlinear and circular, giving real space to wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange and the poet’s entangled loves; it replaces John Felstiner’s 1995 account as the authoritative English biography
The takeaway is Ives’s wild proposition: Celan didn’t write in any language — he wrote in between languages, and his “nonsense” is categorically not an AI hallucination but something allied with intuition and desire, speaking past and future at once. It is why each generation must retranslate him for itself.