Anna Arno writes an engaging, thoughtful biography of Paul Celan
He was born Paul Anschell in 1920, an only child. His life was framed by the place where he grew up and the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century that destroyed his family and everything that was familiar. Yet he survived. Under the name of Paul Celan, he continued to write the poetry he began in his teens, poetry full of the images of life and death.
Previously, there’s been only one full-length biography of Celan, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felsteiner (1936-2017), published in 1995. In 2021, writer Anna Arno published Paul Celan: A Life, and it has now been translated from Polish to English by Anna Arno Gauger.
It’s an engaging, enthralling biography. Arno brings to life a man haunted by tragedy, horrendous events, and loss, and she shows how he folded it all into his poetry.
Celan (1920-1970) was born to an upper middle-class family in the town of Chernivtsi in the region known as Bukovina. Prior to 1918, Chernivtsi has been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his parents, and especially his mother, fully embraced Germanic culture and spoke German in the home. But in 1920, the region was carved out of the old empire and added to the new nation of Romania. After the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Treaty of 1939, the Soviets took over. Then the Germans came back when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. They would hold it until the end of the war, when the Soviet Union made it permanently a part of what is now the western Ukraine.
Living through those events might have been horrifying enough. But the Anschells were also Jewish, which meant the Holocaust. Celan’s parents were both sent to concentration camps, where they died, his mother killed outright and his father murdered or dying from typhus. Celan himself was put into a labor camp, where the inmates primarily worked on building a highway.
Paul Celan as a young man
He survived, but his old life was destroyed. He moved to Bucharest but then moved to Vienna, the capital of the old empire that perhaps still had traces of the Germanic idea and ideal so dear to his mother. By 1950, he was in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. He married, had a son, and experienced loss within his own family. Haunted by depression for a great deal of his life, he killed himself by drowning in the Seine River in Paris in 1970.
Celan was fluent in six languages, and he worked as both a teacher of German language and literature as well as a translator. He wrote poetry in German, the language he learned from his parents. Yet he also fought with that language, inventing words and phrases that were something of a challenge to the words and literature he taught.
Anna Arno
Arno is an essayist, poet, and translator. She’s published three collections of short stories as well as biographies of the German painter Paula Modershon-Becker, the Polish writer Konstanty Jelenski, and now Celan. She received degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and she lives in Krakow, Poland.
Paul Celan: A Life makes for thoughtful, often somber reading. Translation can be tricky, but this biography reads extremely well, as if it had been written in English. You experience the pain of man almost destined for poetry as a child, a man who continued to write in spite of everything he experienced. It’s a fine biography.
Related:
Reading Paul Celan for the First Time.
Photo by Dr. Matthias Eipp, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- “Paul Celan: A Life” by Anna Arno - October 6, 2026
- Reading Paul Celan for the First Time - October 1, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Christian Wiman and “The Dance” - September 29, 2026
L.L. Barkat says
Glynn, this sounds remarkable. To think, he survived the Holocaust but then didn’t survive his own free life years later. How sorrowful.
Glynn says
The scene that keeps replaying in my head is the book’s account of Celan traveling for a visit to Paris in 1938. He’s traveling by train, which takes him through southern Germany. He is on the train the night of Nov. 30, infamous in history at Kristallnacht. As the train rolls on, he can see smoke hovering over cities. Eventually, he comes to realize the smoke was coming from the burning of the synagogues. There he was, a Jew, protected (for the moment) by his Romanian citizenship and passport, traveling through what would be his family’s future.
L.L. Barkat says
Haunting.