Paul Celan

Literary Birthday – 23 November – Paul Celan

Paul Celan was born 23 November 1920, and died 20 April 1970.

Six Quotes

  1. Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
  2. Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
  3. Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.
  4. A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.
  5. no one / bears witness for the / witness
  6. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

Paul Celan was a Romanian poet and translator.  Born into a Jewish family in Romania, Celan translated William Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a ghetto during World War 2. He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. His work is collected in Poems of Paul Celan.

Source for Image

Fair use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Celan_.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 23rd November 2013
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