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اعظم 100 كتاب في التاريخ: ما سر هذه العظمة؟- دراسة بحثية
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مراقب عام سابقا
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Sep 2009
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Paul Celan
(23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a Romanian poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel into a
Jewish
family in the former
Kingdom of Romania
(now
Ukraine
), and changed his name to "Paul Celan" (where Celan in Romanian would be pronounced
Chelan
, and was derived from
Ancel
, pronounced
Antshel
),
[1]
becoming one of the major German-language
poets
of the post-
World War II
era.
Life</SPAN>
Early life
Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking
Jewish
family in
Cernăuţi
, Northern
Bukovina
, a region then part of Romania and earlier part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire
, among others (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a
Zionist
who advocated his son's education in
Hebrew
at
Safah Ivriah
, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received
Chaim Weizmann
of the
World Zionist Organization
in 1927.
His mother, Fritzi, was an avid reader of
German literature
who insisted German be the language of the house. After his
Bar Mitzvah
in 1933, Celan abandoned Zionism (at least to some extent) and finished his formal Hebrew education, instead becoming active in Jewish
Socialist
organizations and fostering support for the
Republican
cause in the
Spanish Civil War
. His earliest known poem, titled
Mother's Day 1938
was an earnest, if sentimental, profession of love. In 1934, fourteen-year old Paul wrote a letter to his aunt Minna in
Palestine
, in which there is the eloquent phrase: "With regard to anti-Semitism in our school, I could write you a 300-page book."
Paul chose the "Lyceum Mihai great governor" (now Chernivtsi school No. 5 before school No. 23), where he studied from 1934 until 1938; the students there had ample opportunity to develop their language and literary skills. At this time Celan began to secretly write poetry. Celan graduated from the gymnasium/preparatory school called Liceul Marele Voivod Mihai (Great Voivode Mihai Prep School) in 1938.
[2]
In 1938 Celan traveled to
Tours
, France, to study
medicine
. The
Anschluss
precluded Vienna, and Romanian schools were harder to get into due to the newly-imposed
Jewish quota
. He returned to Cernăuţi in 1939 to study
literature
and
Romance languages
. His journey to France took him through Berlin as the events of
Kristallnacht
unfolded, and also introduced him to his uncle, Bruno Schrager, who was later among the French detainees who died at
Birkenau
.
Life during World War II</SPAN>
The
Soviet
occupation of Bukovina in June 1940 deprived Celan of any lingering illusions about
Stalinism
and Soviet
Communism
stemming from his earlier socialist engagements; the Soviets quickly imposed bureaucratic reforms on the university where he was studying Romance philology and deportations to
Siberia
started.
Nazi Germany
and Romania brought
ghettos
, internment, and forced labour a year later (
see
Romania during World War II
).
On arrival in Cernăuţi July 1941 the German
SS
Einsatzkommando
and their Romanian allies set the city's
Great Synagogue
on fire. In October, the Romanians deported a large number of Jews after forcing them into a ghetto, where Celan translated
William Shakespeare
's
Sonnets
and continued to write his own poetry, all the while being exposed to traditional
Yiddish
songs and culture. Before the ghetto was dissolved in the fall of that year, Celan was pressed into labor, first clearing the debris of a demolished post office, and then gathering and destroying
Russian
books.
The local mayor strove to mitigate the harsh circumstances until the governor of Bukovina had the Jews rounded up and deported, starting on a Saturday night in June 1942. Celan tried to convince his parents that they leave the country to escape sure prosection, however they wanted to stay in their home. After an argument about this topic, Celan was so angry with them that he spent the night at a family friend's house. It was this night, June 21, that his parents were taken from their home and sent by train to an
internment camp
in
Transnistria
, where two-thirds of the deportees perished. Celan's parents were sent to a labour camp in the Ukraine, where his father likely perished of
typhus
and his mother was shot dead after being exhausted by forced labour. Later that year, after having himself been taken to a labour camp in the
Romanian Old Kingdom
, Celan would receive reports of his parents' deaths.
Celan remained imprisoned until February 1944, when the Red Army's advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned to reassert their control. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Early versions of "Todesfuge" ("
Death Fugue
") were circulated at this time, a poem that clearly relied on accounts coming from the now-liberated camps in Poland. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death.
Life after the war</SPAN>
Considering emigration to Palestine and wary of widespread Soviet
antisemitism
, Celan left the USSR in 1945 for Bucharest, where he remained until 1947. He was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of
Russian literature
into Romanian, and as a poet, publishing his work under a variety of pseudonyms. The literary scene of the time was richly populated with
surrealists
–
Gellu Naum
,
Ilarie Voronca
,
Gherasim Luca
,
Paul Păun
, and
Dolfi Trost
– and it was in this period that Celan developed pseudonyms both for himself and his friends, including the one he took as his pen name.
A version of "Todesfuge" appeared as "Tangoul Morţii" ("Death
Tango
") in a Romanian translation of May 1947. The surrealist ferment of the time was such that additional remarks had to be published explaining that the dancing and musical performances of the poem were realities of the
extermination camp
life.
Night and Fog
, the earliest documentary on Auschwitz (Alain Resnais, 1955), includes a description of the
Auschwitz Orchestra
, an institution organized by the SS to assemble and play selections of German dances and popular songs. (The SS man interviewed by
Claude Lanzmann
for his film
Shoah
, who rehearsed the songs prisoners were made to sing in the death camp, remarked that no Jews who had taught the songs survived.)
Exodus and Paris years</SPAN>
Due to the emerging of the communist regime in Romania, Celan fled Romania for Vienna, Austria. It was there that he befriended
Ingeborg Bachmann
, who had just completed a dissertation on
Martin Heidegger
. Facing a city divided between occupying powers and with little resemblance to the mythic city it once was, which had harboured the then-shattered
Austro-Hungarian
Jewish community, he moved to Paris in 1948. In that year his first poetry collection,
Der Sand aus den Urnen
("Sand from the Urns"), was published in Vienna by A. Sexl. His first few years in Paris were marked by intense feelings of loneliness and isolation, as expressed in letters to his colleagues, including his longtime friend from Cernăuţi, Petre Solomon. It was also during this time that he exchanged many letters with Diet Kloos, a young Dutch singer and anti-Nazi resister who saw her husband of a few months tortured to death. She visited him twice in Paris between 1949 and 1951.
In 1952, Celan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to Germany
[3]
where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of
Group 47
.
[4]
At their May meeting he read his poem "
Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a depiction of concentration camp life. His reading style, which was maybe based on the way a prayer is given in a
synagogue
and Hungarian folk poems, was off-putting to some of the German audience. His poetry received a mixed reaction.
[3]
When
Ingeborg Bachmann
, with whom Celan had an affair, won the group's prize for her collection
Die gestundete Zeit
(
The Extended Hours
), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said "After the meeting, only six people remembered my name". He did not attend any other meeting of the group.
In November 1951, he met the
graphic artist
Gisèle de Lestrange
, in Paris. He sent her many love letters, influenced by
Franz Kafka
's correspondence with
Milena Jesenska
and
Felice Bauer
. They married on December 21, 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family, and during the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters, including a very active exchange with
Hermann Lenz
and his wife, Hanne.[
citation needed
] He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the
École Normale Supérieure
. He was a close friend of
Nelly Sachs
, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet
Yvan Goll
, accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work. Celan was awarded the
Bremen Literature Prize
in 1958 and the
Georg Büchner Prize
in 1960.
Celan committed
suicide
by drowning in the
Seine
river in Paris, around April 20, 1970
Poetry after Auschwitz</SPAN>
The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (
The Holocaust
) are defining forces in Celan's poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after
Auschwitz
that:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.
Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss
.
But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darkness's of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.
It has been written, inaccurately perhaps, that German is the only language that allows (us?) to penetrate the horror of Auschwitz, to describe death from within.
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