Yesterday I mentioned in passing the Holocaust poetry of Chava Rosenfarb; today, I turn your attention to that of Paul Celan—who approached similar themes and experiences in very different ways. Born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a part of Romania that is now in Ukraine, Celan spent the war years in the forced-labor camps; his parents were murdered. He settled in Paris after the war, wrote poetry in German, translated literature from a variety of languages, and drowned himself at the age of forty-nine. Neil Arditi reviews two new translations of his work, and examines his poem “Psalm.”
Celan knew what it was to sing “above, O above/ the thorn.” . . . “Psalm” draws not only on the image of God forming man out of clay in Genesis but also, most crucially, on Psalm 103:15: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.” To the beauty and brevity of that flourishing, Celan adds an uncanny vulnerability: body and soul exposed, proffered like the reproductive organ of a flower to a godforsaken sky.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/14777/blessing-and-rebuke/