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“... also gefragt, wo ich meinen “Eber” herhaben mag,’ the Romanian-Jewish German-speaking poet Paul Celan wrote in a letter to the classicist Walter Jens in May 1961. ‘I’ve asked myself where I might have got my boar from.’ His query concerned the provenance of an image that had appeared in a poem published seven years earlier. Here, from ...”

“... Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up ...”

“... of lyrics and epitaphs who was active in the fifth century BC, and the Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan. Simonides was an original. His epitaphs, designed to be cut into stone and punctiliously composed according to the width of each letter, were lapidary in the original sense of the word. ‘An inscriptional poet,’ Carson explains, ‘has to ...”

“... Paul Celan​ was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine ...”

“... by irony and allusion, in Enzensberger’s case, from the purported anguish and pain. Paul Celan was also a poet of holocaust (his parents died in an extermination camp, and he eventually killed himself) whose ‘aestheticism’ has been an issue: death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue he strikes with leaden bullets his aim is ...”

“... this new and terrible age, to a silence like Hölderlin’s. Trakl is poetry’s worst war loss: Paul Celan, who killed himself after recording the horrors of the next war, is Trakl’s spiritual successor. Celan was the only poet of any nationality to do such a thing in poetry, and German is probably the only ...”

“... as it were, a precise and searching idiom of distrust. But the real poet of these horrors, Paul Celan, had no such distrust. His vision of them is wholly individual, wholly his own; so that his words exist not beside the thing they describe but have become it. The language of real poetry can do that, and in so doing, as R.P. Blackmur put ...”

“... that I think they are appropriate. If you like this sort of thing – Rod McKuen, with a slight Paul Celan mordancy – then this is the book for ...”

“... going beyond the text, in the relationship between myth, history and literature. Elements of Paul Celan’s life can be found in Memel’s (reviewers’ attention is drawn to this in the press release, but there’s no explicit mention in the novel): the Jewish Romanian background, the consequences of Nazism and the eventual exile in Paris. Above ...”

“... than the city’s million filaments’, or in the B52s of ‘Love in Asia’. The starkness of Paul Celan, his sense of rock-bottom desolation, are absent, but Looking into the Deep End is a modest success in the painterly exploration of suffering. There is everywhere in the volume a vivid and disciplined visual exactitude, ‘vision in the factual ...”

“... could no longer really speak German because it was the language of their torturers. The poems of Paul Celan, like the mandarin polemics of Adorno, bear ample witness, as Gilman shows, to the new impossibilities. It is not surprising that the Jew as a mad person, the Jew as someone maddened by the world, should come to haunt post-holocaust ...”

“... unknown (or too well-known) man. A book, In the Wake of a Deadad, would emerge. Even silence – Paul Auster, Dinos Chapman, Richard Wentworth – would be published. ‘No reply’ becomes part of the texture, along with hesitations, prevarications, confessions. Many of the respondents turn Kötting’s challenge back on themselves: their refusal to look ...”

“... nor the exhibition has much to say. The show doesn’t dodge the difficult questions. Both Paul Celan’s Death Fugue and Kiefer’s work feature here as ways of remembering the 12 years of Nazi rule, but there are other, more prosaic objects too. The concentration camps are represented by a replica of a gate at Buchenwald, inscribed not with the ...”

“... up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing’. So much for those excitable fellows with their politics and their attempts to reimagine the world. I’m a devoted admirer of the ...”

“... of judgment ... are invested in the overnight.’ After all, who would set Toni Morrison next to Paul Celan? And lest this reference to black women writers of the Eighties appear a random example, we might look at Steiner’s musings on the relation between gender and art. He considers the act of aesthetic creativity an imitation of God’s fiat. ‘In ...”