Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Paul Celan: A Life

Paul Celan: A Life

Arno, Anna
Gauger, Soren

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralHistorical FiguresLiterary Figures

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 0674298632
ISBN13: 9780674298637
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: Jun 9 2026
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.75
Height: 1.45 Width: 6.39 Depth: 9.51
Language: English

An act of devotion without monument-making...Arno's achievement is to return Celan to mortal scale: ardent in friendship, hungry for recognition, capable of wounded tenderness.
--Benjamin Balint, The Wall Street Journal

A luminous, groundbreaking biography of one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, best known for the poem Deathfugue.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was recognized as the greatest poet of the German language shortly before his tragic death just shy of his fiftieth birthday, when he drowned himself in the Seine. He described his Todesfuge (Deathfugue) as a tombstone for his mother, who perished in the Holocaust. Celan's work is often viewed as a rejoinder to Theodor Adorno's dictum that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

While the commentary on Celan's contributions to poetics and Holocaust literature is voluminous, little has been written about his life itself. Anna Arno provides the definitive biography. Paul Celan: A Life follows the poet from his birthplace, Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine), to Bucharest, where he was part of an important circle of Surrealists; then on to Vienna, where he met and fell in love with Ingeborg Bachmann; and finally to Paris. Although in his final years he was haunted by bouts of mental illness, his life cannot be defined by its implosion. Paul Celan was an ardent, inveterate romantic whose many meaningful relationships left their mark on his poetry. He also cultivated intense, often fraught dialogues with such thinkers as René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, and Martin Heidegger.

Drawing upon a linguistically wide range of archival sources and the most up-to-date research, Arno presents a complete picture of Celan's life. Here is the essential story of a towering figure in modern poetry.

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