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Why Paul Celan Took Alarm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yves Bonnefoy  and
John Felstiner
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Extract

Paul Celan Breaks Into “Tears, His Body Shaken by Sobbing, the Whole Affair Again Present, Accusings, Denouncings, as Stunned and distressed as on day 1.” It's June 1966 in Paris, and he has gone with Yves Bonnefoy to visit a “most generous, most welcoming” friend who has “deep instincts for a poet's quality and for how infamous these attacks on Celan were.” But “[t]hat trustful welcome had only deepened the open wound.”

Nothing in the life of Paul Celan (1920-70), short of his parents' murder in the Holocaust, racked him more than the vicious, specious plagiarism charges a German French writer, Claire Goll, launched against him on behalf of her deceased husband. As Bonnefoy saw all too well, Celan never recovered from them.

Type
Criticism in Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 204 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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References

Works Cited

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