Corona

Paul Celan, arguably the mid-20th century’s most important German-language poet, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust—a term, however, he never used. Undoing facile assumptions about Celan, Corona charts a more idiosyncratic and personal path through Celan’s large oeuvre, choosing 103 poems from among the more than 900 Celan published. The bilingual selection includes work from all of Celan’s periods and genres.

Paul Celan PAUL CELAN was born in Romania in 1920. In 1942, his parents were deported and died in an extermination camp. Celan escaped but was in a labor camp until 1944. In 1948, he settled in Paris, which remained his home until his suicide by drowning in 1970. Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. Celan received the Bremen Prize for German Literature in 1958 and the Georg Buchner Prize in 1960.