Paul Celan's poetry presents an exquisite imagination wrapped in an unspeakable pain. The pain is literally unspeakable. That is Celan's theme. The language, whether Celan's German or a translator's English, is inadequate to the pain. To express it approximately, he must pummel and reconstitute grammar, combine and recombine words, often eliminate information and facts and allow ordinary acts and objects to assume extraordinary dimensions, as symbols of the most enormous and ineffable excruciation.

The challenge of this sort of problem— of making poetry from terror, horror and speechlessness— and Celan's often interesting solutions to it, his exquisite phrases, are a source of his recent posthumous celebrity. His obviously tormented life is another source, though one that, to judge from Michael Hamburger's introduction to this volume of translations, Celan himself would have dismissed. Celan saw himself, according to Hamburger, as aspiring to write “pure” poetry, along with a great many other poets in France after Mallarmé. “Pure” poetry, even in the dismal shadow of the Second World War, in the Paris of the early fifties, was not viewed as unfriendly to political and social issues. The terrors of the concentration camp, the horror of a mother shot to death, genocide and the death of a young son were not incompatible with writing a poetry that could simultaneously respond to these events and stand on its own as poetry, that would be something more than an outraged letter to a friend or a tortured entry in a diary. The enduring question is whether and how well Celan succeeded.

His very life seems to have been a kind of surrealistic roller coaster, with many details, especially of the final years (he committed suicide in 1970), apparently not yet made public. He was born in Czernowitz, in Bukovina, in 1920, as Paul Antschel. His name changes— first to Ancel, then to Celan, an anagram adopted after the publication of his first poems in Romania in 1947— may or may not offer clues to what often seems a chameleon existence and a chameleon art. Adaptations of the life and of the work, a constant restructuring, took place against a background of violence and changes of nationality and language.