It was early morning on Sunday, 9 September 1739. While most South Carolina settlers were preparing for church, nearly Two dozen slaves gathered near the Stono River less than twenty miles from Charlestown. After attacking a local store to secure firearms, the group moved south toward Saint Augustine, Florida, swelling in number and spreading terror along the way. The rebels killed more than twenty settlers and set numerous buildings on fire before being defeated by a colonial militia at the Edisto River the following day (Wood 306-26). This unprecedented insurrection rocked the colony to its core and brought about legislation with important implications for literacy in the colonies that became the United States.

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.

To Anne Curzan in “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar” (124.3 [2009]: 870-79), the important thing is not that students learn, for instance, to use apostrophes correctly but that they question where the rules for apostrophes came from. This skewed priority is part and parcel of Curzan's commitment to “the kind of critical pedagogy that most of us espouse” (871).

It's Only Normal that Paul Celan was harshly affected by the base slander—accusations of plagiarism—leveled at him by Claire Goll. It's less normal that he should have suffered from this all his life even though these clearly mendacious accusations allowed him to know that most readers spontaneously took his side.

This brief essay tries to grasp the reasons for this irreducible affliction and finds them in the deepest rapport between a poet and his thought of what poetry is.