Bruce J. Krajewski reviews Paul Celan: A Life

Anna Arno. Paul Celan: A Life. Trans. Soren Gauger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2026. 404 pp.

16 July 2026

“He made her understand she was unworthy of the gift of his presence” (p. 304). The “she” is Monique Köpke, one of many women Paul Celan mistreated before the MeToo era. Arguably the greatest poet of the German language, Celan expected much from the world, his readers, and the people with whom he associated, but he apparently excused his own haughtiness and abuses in the name of poetry rooted in the blood and ashes of fascism. Anna Arno registers no remorse from Celan, though at one of his lowest moments “he blamed his disappointment on . . . all of Western culture” (p. 262).

If you’re unaware of this unappealing side of Celan, it’s partly attributable to the scholarly reception of Celan’s work, a reception dominated by partisans of Martin Heidegger, who attempted to woo Celan during one of their meetings by convincing local bookshop owners to put Celan’s books in window displays. These partisans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry theorists among them, bewitched by Heidegger’s die Sprache spricht, promulgate a view that readers should listen to Celan’s poems apart from biographical linkages. Focus mainly on the words themselves, not the poet. Thus, Anne Carson: “A poet’s despair is not just personal; he despairs of the word.”[1] As Gerald Bruns has it, “In the absence of external contexts, one has only the words themselves.”[2] Likewise, Jacques Derrida: “The poem speaks, even if none of its references is intelligible.”[3] The scholarly counsel is to encounter the poems as, for example, an “acoustical experience.”[4]

Yet, those positions are difficult to square with Celan’s own declarations: “‘My poems are my biography’” (p. 212). In another letter: “‘I haven’t written a single line that isn’t tied to my existence’” (p. 302). Arno admits, “He is always writing about himself” and she reports how Celan felt wounded by those who did not understand the relationship of Treblinka and Sobibor to his poem “Deathfugue” (p. 135). Celan did not want his poem “pigeonholed” as something “divorced from history” (p. 173).

He complained about being misunderstood. He felt more comfortable among people who shared his linguistic, cultural, and geographical background. “He cut ties with everyone who was not entirely ‘clean.’” “Even in the company of well-wishing readers he could suddenly recall he was surrounded by strangers who did not know his homeland” (pp. 243, 244). However, Celan shifted his personal history over time. Sometimes he stressed his Romanian heritage. Other times he called himself a “‘Russian poet in the fatherland of German infidels’” (p. 261). He became a French citizen in 1955 after having worked years as a writer and translator in Paris. Arno opens the book with a lengthy description of where Celan grew up, a city in what is now Ukraine. Celan emerged from a “mosaic culture” in Chernivtsi, and maintained a multicultural existence throughout his life (p. 10).

Arno’s is not a scholarly survey of Celan’s reception. Nor is it a strictly chronological life of Celan, which unfortunately makes the narrative seem, at times, disjointed. A translation of a 2021 Polish edition, Arno’s book succeeds as the telling of a messy, tumultuous, literary life of a gifted-but-haunted writer, a self-described “tragic poet” who was unfaithful, unstable (hospitalized a few times for psychiatric care), and occasionally violent. Arno maintains a respectful, non-sensationalistic tone, allowing Celan’s friends and lovers to convey their sense of him, even when those accounts are unflattering, as in Serge Mosovici’s view that “‘he divided people into two categories: poets, to whom he ascribed certain traits of divinity, and non-poets, as if he considered himself a higher being’” (p. 127). Arno: “[Celan] was even put off by the very fact that an outside reader had as much right to interpret a poem as the poet” (p. 166).

[1] Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (Princeton, N.J., 1999), p. 121.

[2] Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly (New York, 2006), p. 45.

[3] Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” trans. Joshua Wilner, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Wilner et al., ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York, 2005), p. 33.

[4] Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy, p. 45.