Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T16:26:04.847Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why Paul Celan Took Alarm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Yves Bonnefoy  and
John Felstiner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” 1949. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT P, 1955. 17-34. Print.Google Scholar
Bonnefoy, Yves. Ce qui alarma Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Bonnefoy, Yves. “Comment traduire Shakespeare?” Études anglaises 17 (1964): 341–51. Print.Google Scholar
Bonnefoy, Yves. Message to the author. 13 July 2008. E-mail.Google Scholar
Bonnefoy, Yves. “Paul Celan.” Revue de belles lettres 96.2-3 (1972): 91–95. Print.Google Scholar
Celan, Paul. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Allemann, Beda, Reichert, Stefan, and Bücher, Rolf. 5 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Celan, Paul. Letter to a high school teacher. 17 Feb. 1958. Hermes 4.3 (1958): 4. Print.Google Scholar
Chalfen, Israel. Paul Celan: Eine Biographie seiner Jugend. Frankfurt: Insel, 1979. Print.Google Scholar
Goll, Claire. “Unbekanntes über Paul Celan.” Baubudenpoet 5 (1960): 115–16. Print.Google Scholar