Paul Celan - Anna Arno

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Paul Celan

by
Anna Arno

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Paul Celan
Author:	Anna Arno
Genre:	Biography
Written:	2021 (Eng. 2026)
Length:	334 pages
Original in:	Polish
Availability:	Paul Celan - US
	Paul Celan - UK
	Paul Celan - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

A Life
Polish title: Paul Celan
Translated by Soren Gauger
With numerous photographs

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Our Assessment:

B : solid life-overview

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The American Scholar	.	9/7/2026	Piotr Florczyk
Literary Review	.	7/2026	Charlie Louth
The Spectator	.	27/6/2026	Graham Robb
Wall St. Journal	.	5/6/2026	Benjamin Balint

From the Reviews:

"Arno’s 15 erudite chapters, expertly translated by Soren Gauger, recount Celan’s life thematically (his home town, his courtship of his future wife, his mental health, etc.) rather than chronologically, lending the book a lively, even messy, feel. Indeed, that dynamism seems to mirror what’s already known about Celan: namely that he was mercurial, especially in his later years" - Piotr Florczyk, The American Scholar

"Postwar anti-Semitism is a leitmotif of this rivetingly depressing book, as it was of Celan’s adult life. (...) This English version of Arno’s admirable biography deserved a firmer editorial hand. The index is lacunary, which is especially regrettable in such a well-researched study, and the translation has many moments of flowery awkwardness." - Graham Robb, The Spectator

"By threading Celan’s poems through the lived record, Ms. Arno restores a proud, wounded, flirtatious, multilingual man often romanticized by reverence. Her account, translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger, is an act of devotion without monument-making. (...) Ms. Arno’s postwar chapters are strongest when they keep catastrophe from swallowing the rest of the life. (...) Ms. Arno’s achievement is to return Celan to mortal scale: ardent in friendship, hungry for recognition, capable of wounded tenderness." - Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Paul Celan (1920-1970) was among the greatest German-writing poets of the twentieth century, making his mark early already with his best-known -- indeed, arguably defining -- work, the poem 'Todesfuge' (see, e.g. Pierre Joris' translation, Death Fugue), which Anna Arno prints in full (in translation) as the epigraph to her biography. (Ironically, 'Todesfuge' first appeared in 1947 in Romanian translation, as 'Tangoul morții' ('Tango of death'); the German original first appeared in the collection Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948).)
       Celan was born in then just and still Romanian Cernăuți -- as the former Austro-Hungarian capital of Bukovina, Czernowitz, was known after the collapse of the empire --, which became part of the Soviet Union (and now modern-day Ukraine) in 1940 and is now known as Chernivtsi (the name Arno generally sticks to, to: "avoid the confusion of changing the name to suit the time period", as she explains). German-speaking, Celan was good at languages and learned and spoke Romanian and French fluently, but basically only wrote in German -- despite barely ever living in a German-speaking country (his fairly brief time in Vienna, on his way to Paris, was about the extent of it); as Arno puts it: "German remained his only language of writing: dense, complex, and, as Celan was educated on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, strongly inflected with other languages". His Czernowitz background -- just like that of the only slightly older Gregor von Rezzori -- marked him and his writing; Arno quotes him at one point as introducing himself as being: "a late-born citizen of the K. K. (Imperial Austria)".
       Celan was born 'Paul Antschel' but adopted the alternate-name -- an anagram of the common Romanized version of 'Antschel', 'Ancel' -- already for his debut and stuck with it, even applying to officially change his name to 'Celan' -- but:

Paul Celan was finally made a French citizen in the summer of 1955. He did not, however, manage to formalize his pen name. Until the end of his life, his official documents read "Paul Antschel," though he used "Celan" wherever possible, as it had long been more than a pseudonym to him. He also felt it was important that the Germans pronounced it in German fashion, and the French pronounced it their way.

(I've always pronounced it 'Tschel-an' (because his name was originally: 'An-tschel'), but no one seems to do that; unfortunately Arno does not explain what she means by: pronouncing it in 'German fashion' or what the 'French way' of pronouncing it might be (the popular form generally seems to be 'Tse-lan'), so I am still none the wiser.)
Arno's biography proceeds basically chronologically, but her fifteen chapters also each have a particular focus -- say, Celan's relationship with Ingeborg Bachmann, or his marriage --, making for overlaps of time and even great leaps ahead at times. So, for example, in the chapter on his marriage to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, Arno also discusses their collaborations -- all the way to:

In 1969, the Celans released another joint volume, Schwarzmaut (Black Toll). This was made in new circumstances. After Celan's major mental breakdown, they no longer lived together. Their correspondence also trailed off. Celan saw only his son regularly, and it was through him that he passed on his poems.

       That's a lot to take in -- beginning with the mention of a 'major mental breakdown' --, which Arno doesn't go into here; we only learn some more of the details much later on. Meanwhile, the next chapter opens: "What was Germany like in the 1950s ?" and the focus is on Celan's experiences in Germany and writing in German in that decade.
       This not entirely chronological approach takes some getting used to; it also amplifies the sense of some things falling through the cracks, as some events and times are not covered in much depth. So, for example, Celan traveled to France before the outbreak of World War II -- "He crossed through Germany right on Kristallnacht" ! -- , going to study medicine in Tours and visiting Paris, but unable to continue with his medical studies after returning to Romania in the summer of 1939 because of the outbreak of the war; Arno devotes a page to this, his first French stay, but surely there was more to describe there.
       Somewhat odd, too, is the limited presence (then also in their absence) of the parents; there's not nearly as much about them as one might expect. Their deaths obviously haunt Celan (and his work), but even that is not really considered all that much over the years that followed. Arno notes that: "Paul did not mention his parents to his friends, but his sense of guilt cast a pall over all his conversations" -- and seems to treat them and their deaths much the same.
       Arno connects life and work throughout, quoting extensively from Celan's (and some other) poetry (in this translation, generally in Pierre Joris' translations, while: "When no direct translations of non-English quotations are available, translations were done directly from German, in collaboration with the author"). This is generally of interest, especially where the connections are obvious and close; often, however, one wishes for the German originals to be presented as well, at least in the endnotes.
       Arno also usefully reminds how much of Celan's own life and work was devoted to translation -- from three months spent in Geneva in 1956, working as a translator for the International Labour Office to his two translations of Maigret-novels by Simenon (apparently not his best work -- though these were unsurprisingly: "Celan's best-selling translations") -- to the many poets he translated.
       The devastating attack on him by Claire Goll -- she accused him of having plagiarized her husband Yves' work -- pops up repeatedly (as, unfortunately for Celan, her attacks went on for quite a while). As Barbara Wiedemann's over-900-page documentation of that mess -- see the Suhrkamp publicity page -- suggests, it was far-reaching and hard for Celan to escape; Arno does a good job of covering the basics and how it affected Celan over the years.
       Arno does mention that Celan was frequently hospitalized, at times for longer periods, in the last years of his life as he struggled with mental health issues, but that -- and then also his suicide -- are cautiously treated; again, one might have wished for more detail.
       Throughout, there is often more summary telling -- about Celan's character and how he acted and was perceived -- than showing, and more examples of his behavior and especially his interaction with others in support of these would have been helpful. While frequently presented as a loner who kept to himself and worked in isolation; he also comes across as very social (and rather needy, in terms of wanting company, Arno mentioning several times his complaints about being lonely) -- not least then also in the number of lovers her takes. (There's also that bizarre detail: "In their letters, Celan and his fiancée, Gisèle Lestrange, used the second-person formal vous form of address. [...] They maintained this practice even in their intimate letters and after years of living together" .....)
       The occasional descriptions of Celan in action and reaction suggest that more of these might have been helpful, to get a better feel for the man -- as in the admittedly extreme case of a dinner that got a bit out of hand:

The dinner with literary scholar Walther Killy and his wife, Eva, whom the Celans visited in the Passau region, came to a bad conclusion. The Killys probably commented on news they had heard on the radio, about a Jew who murdered a Nazi criminal in an act of revenge. Celan was impressed by this act; he took offense at his host, who did not share his feeling. Furthermore, the home had a traditional corner with a crucifix: Celan needled his host for betraying his Jewish roots. Finally, he demonstratively hopped on the table and sang the song of the Nazi Party, the "Horst-Wesel-Lied." "You left into the dark night, without a word of goodbye, as though leaving the scene of a crime," an incensed Killy wrote.

       (Such an account also leaves so many questions: 'probably commented'? What was Gisèle doing during all this ? (she was apparently there). Celan really 'hopped on the table' ? (this was apparently in 1964 -- and earlier in the same paragraph Arno mentions, apparently as a side effect of the medicines he was taking: "He had gained weight"; it's hard to imagine him as table-jumping-agile at that point).)
       Paul Celan is a solid introduction to man and work -- and especially good on how the life was reflected in the work -- but could certainly have gone into considerably greater depth as to his life and experiences. (One notes that the Polish original is listed as having 640 pages; even with the endnotes, the English version only has 385 .....). For all his going his own way, Celan also interacted with a great number of significant figures; Arno covers some of these quite well -- though, again, the not-quite-chronological approach of the book (except where completely focused on the subject, such as on Ingeborg Bachmann) often gets in the way of a sense of continuity or the arc of a relationship (such as, to take just one example, Günter Grass, just popping up here and there).
       A bibliography -- at least of the original publication of Celan's texts (with the main English book-translations as a bonus ...) -- would also have been welcome, in particular since Arno (or rather, presumably, translator Soren Gauger) rarely gives the original German titles even of the collections (particularly irritating with Die Niemandsrose, referred to here by one of its (many) English titles, the terrible one of: NoOnesRose).
       (Obviously, in the original Polish the specifics of how Celan was Englished were not a major concern, but given the reliance on Pierre Joris' translations here, as well as the fact that there are so many other versions, most notably Michael Hamburger's, a closer consideration of this would be of tremendous interest to English-speaking readers. As is, we have only a tantalizing mention of Celan in London in 1950, spending several days meeting with: "a group of young, German-speaking émigré poets" -- usually at Erich Fried's home, where: "Sometimes the teenaged Michael Hamburger, Celan's future English translator, would drop by as well" .....)
       Given how Arno jumps around in time, a basic chronology of the significant events, times, and places would also have been a useful point of reference for readers to turn to. And, yes, the German original of the many quoted verses -- even if only in the endnotes -- would have been welcome as well.
       Often fascinating and revealing, Paul Celan is a fine and quite thorough overview of Celan's life -- even if he remains an elusive figure that, despite all the meticulous research, Arno never seems to get quite a full grip on.

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 August 2026

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Links:

Paul Celan:

Harvard University Press publicity page
Wydawnictwo Literackie foreign rights page
Excerpt
Excerpt

Reviews:

Paul Celan:

Paul Celan at books and writers

Works by Paul Celan under review:

Romanian Poems

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Biographical works under review
See Index of Poetry

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About the Author:

Polish author Anna Arno was born in 1984.

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