Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband's work. He was a close friend of Nelly Sachs, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature.Ĭelan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. He made his living as a translator and lecturer in German at the École Normale Supérieure. During the following 18 years they wrote over 700 letters amongst the active correspondents of Celan were Hermann Lenz and his wife, Hanne. They married on December 21, 1952, despite the opposition of her aristocratic family. He sent her many love letters, influenced by Franz Kafka's correspondence with Milena Jesenska and Felice Bauer. In November 1951, he met the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange, in Paris. He did not attend any other meeting of the group. When Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Celan had an affair, won the group's prize for her collection Die gestundete Zeit (The Extended Hours), Celan (whose work had received only six votes) said After the meeting, only six people remembered my name. At their May meeting he read his poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue), a depiction of concentration camp life. In 1952, Celan's writing began to gain recognition when he read his poetry on his first reading trip to Germany where he was invited to read at the semiannual meetings of Group 47. He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Chernivtsy, Ukraine, and adopted the pseudonym Paul Celan. About Paul Celan Paul Celan was a German language poet and translator.

Celan poet