ANCA ([email protected])
Sat, 5 Dec 1998 18:04:43 +0200
>Anca, in Bucharest - do you know anythng about Celan? I'd love to
>know more about him.
Thanks Stephen for making that point about 'A Sort Of Homecoming' and Paul
Celan! Unfortunately, weird as it may seem, I first read and learnt about
him... while reading 'U2 - A Conspiracy Of Hope' from the British Library,
back in 1995. Why? Because he defected to France so of course was erased
from any official literary history and we are slow at recovering our past.
Anyway here's the abridged Encarta entry concerning him:
'Paul Celan was a Romanian-born French writer of poems in German. He was
born in a German-speaking Jewish family, in Czernovitz, Bukovina, Romania,
in 1920. In 1942, while he was a student in his native city, his parents
were deported and died in a concentration camp, and he was detained in a
labour camp. After his release in 1944 he moved to Bucharest, but left
Romania in 1947, settling in France, where he took citizenship, taught
German at the �cole Normale Sup�rieure in Paris, and translated French poets
into German. Celan's first major collection of his own verse, ''Mohn und
Ged�chtnis'' (1952, ''Poppy and Memory''), includes his best known poem,
"Todesfuge" (1948, "Death Fugue"), a depiction of the Nazi extermination
camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. His poems, influenced by Surrealism and often
using biblical imagery, express his sense of the absurdity of modern life
and the difficulty of communication. Celan drowned himself in the River
Seine in Paris in 1970.'
I want to make some points though: Czernovitz as part of Bukovina and
Bessarabia were claimed by the Russians, in '40, and the Romanians fought
along the Germans to get them back. We never got them back in the end, but
that's another story. The point is that probably Celan's parents were
deported by Germans, not by Romanians (if this isn't true, the Romanians are
to blame as well!). In my opinion, Celan didn't commit suicide out of guilt
about his past (after all, he was 50, 28 years later), but because he had a
sensitive nature and felt alienated... think about it, living in Paris,
writing in German... I know his poems have been translated in Romanian this
year, but I failed to find them so far - it may even be a bilingual edition.
The poem Bono speaks about may be the above-cited poem, 'Todesfuge'; clearly
the theme and the surrealist atmosphere correspond. 'A Sort Of Homecoming'
is a beautiful song and the description of the winter landscape is really
accurate. Come and see it for yourself if you don't believe me :)!
Anca
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