Paul Celan’s Biblical Modernism

Yesterday I mentioned in passing the Holocaust poetry of Chava Rosenfarb; today, I turn your attention to that of Paul Celan—who approached similar themes and experiences in very different ways. Born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a part of Romania that is now in Ukraine, Celan spent the war years in the forced-labor camps; his parents were murdered. He settled in Paris after the war, wrote poetry in German, translated literature from a variety of languages, and drowned himself at the age of forty-nine. Neil Arditi reviews two new translations of his work, and examines his poem “Psalm.”