Ángel Antonio Herrera: Celan, tragic titan

Paul Celan gave his own biography a tombstone coinage, with a suicide note, in a powerful verse: “a flight of wounds.” There is his own life, and in his own life is the long and lasting pain, incalculable, even metaphysical, of so many. … who suffered to death in Auschwitz, and in other concentration camps, like their own parents. In his life, and, naturally, in his work, which is not a different field, and he draws bitterness from the first. Celan lived poorly in a labor camp in Moldova. There he received the news of his complete orphanhood. After his liberation, he ended up in Bucharest, then in Vienna, and finally in Paris, where he joined the eternal census of suicides by jumping into the Seine from the Mirabeau bridge.

It was the closing of an existence of almost half a century of uprooting, of a malaise of internal exile, and the beginning of the consecration of a cult author, under the emphatic laurel of the first lyricist in German of the second post-war period. He signed the most fiercely shocking poem about the Holocaust, ‘Todesfuge’, with his mother in the background, because one can never be cured of barbarism, but even less so from the barbarism within the barbarism that comes to fulfill the murder of one’s own mother. , there on one of the many lethal days in the calendar of executions at the Janowska concentration camp. Celan, therefore, was always a wounded man with a cause, and from that wound he took flight in a work of a dark, difficult, hermetic and often aesthetic poet, because beauty is a balm in the face of debacle, a violin of lights in “the descent.” “to the heart of the night,” to put it in the words of one of Celan’s brothers, the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente.

There is much in Celan from a poet for poets. In August 1948, he wrote: “Perhaps I am one of the last who must live to the end the destiny of the Jews in Europe.” Words are a poetic creed, because only words can combat disaster, because continuing in the world of a poet is a way of leaving in the air, for everyone, the essential questions that do not go away. Celan, tragic titan, fired the language of beauty against the apocalypse.

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