Paul Celan is the German poet who has had the most important and profound influence on the world since the second half of the twentieth century. Celan, whose original name was Antschel, was born in Zenovich in 1920 (originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Romania after the collapse of the empire, and now part of Ukraine). Like his predecessors Kafka and Zweig, he had Jewish blood flows.

When Celan graduated from high school in the spring of 1938, the German army entered Vienna. On November 9, 1938, he left for France to study pre-med. When the train passed through Berlin, he caught up with the first Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis. He later looked back on that moment: "You saw the smoke / coming from tomorrow." It was the beginning of the end for Jewish life in Europe. When Celan was studying medicine in Paris, he came into contact with French Surrealist and Symbolist poetry: he read Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Holderlin, Trakl, Nietzsche, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Kafka and others. works; he was particularly fond of Rilke - his fascination with metaphors, allusions, dreams and various images became the distinctive mark of almost all his early works.

In 1942, Celan’s parents were deported to the Nazi concentration camp and died tragically there: his father died of typhoid due to forced work, and his mother was even worse. The poet was shattered by Nazi bullets. mother's neck. Celan survived under the protection of his friends, and was later forced to work as a coolie to build roads and went through many hardships. After the war, Celan was able to return to his ruined hometown. From April 1945 to December 1947, Celan lived in Bucharest for nearly two years, engaged in translation and writing. He first used Ancel as his pen name, and later reversed the syllables and used Celan as his own name, which in Latin means "something to hide or keep secret." And this change is decisive: from now on, not only his life experience, but also his famously "obscure" poems, his tragic heart, and even his death will all be placed in this painful and confusing background. Down.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), a Jewish-German philosopher who lived in exile in the United States, believed: "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric and impossible." Celan's poem "Death Fugue" published in 1945 shocked the post-war German poetry circle with its powerful indictment of the evil nature of the Nazis and its profound and original artistic power. It was later included in the 1948 collection of poems "Sand from the Urn" . "Death Fugue" is almost a household name in Germany and has become a symbol of "ruin literature". Adorno finally retracted his aphorism: "Long-term suffering has a right to express, just as the tortured has a right to cry. So it may be wrong to say that you can't write poetry after Auschwitz." Celan became the hero of war in one fell swoop The most popular poet among the ruins. After that, he successively published many poetry collections such as "Poppies and Memories" (1952), reaching impressive artistic heights and becoming the most important representative of "witness literature" in Europe after World War II. He also actively translated poetry from France, Britain and many other countries into German, and introduced the works of Russian poets such as Blok and Yesenin to the country.

After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, many Jews in Europe moved there; but Celan decided to stay in Europe - he chose to settle in Paris. He wrote in a letter to his relatives in Israel: "Perhaps I am the last person and poet who has lived to the end of the spiritual destiny of European Jews - if I give up writing, there will be nothing in this world..."

In early 1958, Celan won the Bremen Literature Prize; in 1960, he won the Büchner Prize, the German literary award. But what is extremely significant is that his later works became increasingly dark and obscure. The collection of poems "Nobody's Rose" and "A Glimmer of Sunshine" concentrated on his disappointment with all things in the world, reflecting the heavy concentration camp burden that Celan carried. The shadow of life and intense inner conflicts.

Around April 20, 1970, Celan committed suicide by jumping from the Seine River Bridge in Paris; on May 1, a fisherman discovered his body 7 miles downstream of the Seine. His suicide is quite heavy. It is a very heavy way to answer and end the burden of historical catastrophes on individual life. The last thing left on Celan's desk was an open biography of H?lderlin. He underlined one section: “Sometimes this genius went dark and sank into the bitter well of his heart,” while the rest of the sentence was ununderlined: “But above all, his star of revelation shone strangely ."

Celan is a poet who writes in the face of death and violence from beginning to end. As a German poet whose parents died in the Nazi concentration camps, experienced many years of exile, suffered from schizophrenia, and finally drowned himself in the Seine River, Celan contributed to the world the most outstanding poetry about death, despair and mystery. What the war engraved in Paul Celan's thought scale was the shattering, tearing and endless darkness of life and life. Even in the days after the war, when the poet was shrouded in dark themes, or in the process of sharpening dark themes, the feeling of fragmentation and tearing always permeated his inner spiritual space and refused to go away. Judging from the overall trend, Celan's poems are full of broken and surreal images, especially the imagination of death. He faced the world that brought him doom with suspicion, confrontation, and rage.

Reading his poems, when faced with the reality of historical catastrophes that destroy lives, the overwhelming feeling of weight and darkness permeates everywhere, almost making people breathless; and it feels like it is reflected in sharp glass. The bright light above the fragments and the darkness are reduced, and the pain of cutting the skin becomes deeper and deeper. The commentator hits the mark: the poet Celan’s language “comes from a kingdom of death.” Michael Dirda of Yale University believes that Celan is like an ancient prophet, revealing the eternal burden of mankind, and his poems are "essentially drops of blood."

Celan was also a courageous and original poet: he did not succumb to the violence of history, nor did he cater to the postwar German literary world's overriding concern for social issues, or the kind of "The name of the majority" imposes demands on a poet. From the perspective of poetry form, the traditional factors of Celan’s early poetry are mainly reflected in four aspects: there are many punctuation rules, complete sentences, and standard syntax and grammar; he inherited the poetry rhyme of ancient Greece, and he often used iambics (xX) and cadences. iambic (Xx) rhyme, especially iambic (Xxx) rhyme is preferred; most of the poems are composed of long sentences that are smooth and musical. The language seems to be released and runs freely; the metaphors are clearer and the images are rich. The influence of German Romanticism and French Surrealism is particularly obvious and quite traditional. After experiencing the new experience of Auschwitz, the sharp despair and humiliation that the will firmly suppressed has inevitably become a grand background for Celan's examination. He uses words to build a dimension, a dialogue The transcendence of language has become part of his attitude, and is more of a confrontation with God. Thinking about God repeatedly is a scientific way of grasping it, while participating in a dialogue with God is a poetic way of grasping it. Human beings are self-reliant at every moment. No matter massacre, questioning, imprisonment, or even forgetting, they cannot modify the impeccable past. In the eternal change that makes people tremble, in Celan's words, poetry completes his own life practice. of gathering. He tried hard to hide the secret passage leading to the existential consciousness of his poems. He refused simple explanations. What he tried to do was only the possibility of self-expression. What the poems presented was self-closure against all rational interpretations. He believes that life lies in dialogue, and poetry is a form of "dialogue", but it is a "desperate dialogue" or a "message in a bottle": "It may be washed away at any time and place." Land, perhaps the land of the soul" ("Bremen Literature Prize Acceptance Speech"). He believed that his Brechtian social allegory poems were often too simple and cheap, and the dialectical rhetoric of life and death, light and darkness used in his early poems became increasingly superficial and stereotyped. Now, he demands more "darkness," "rupture," and "silence" into his poetry. In fact, a profound distrust of language expression and public interest made him prone to becoming a "mute". Celan's writing since "Death Fugue" has not used the exaggeration of suffering to attract people's sympathy, but has reached the core of language and deeply explored the inner voice of the individual. It has begun a more arduous and difficult journey. The artistic process of being understood. The original protest themes and musicality disappeared, and what appeared in front of people were only some extremely condensed and incomprehensible poetic texts. Celan talked about the new writing trend: "I no longer pay attention to musicality. Like the highly praised 'Death Fugue' period, which was repeatedly included in various textbooks, I try to cut off the spectral analysis of things. Showing them at once in multifaceted penetrations, I regard the so-called ambiguity of abstraction and reality as moments of reality.” His later works, out of balance due to separation from imagery and metaphor, became dark and opaque, becoming shorter and shorter. , becoming more and more fragmented and abstract; each word is isolated and no longer refers to anything other than itself; his poetry's suppression of lyrical echoes and his passion for dismantling the meaning of words make him slowly close the dialogue Door - perhaps caused by his inner trauma, it drove him to go further on the road of language, far into the center of darkness, until we can no longer see him. The division between expression and soul, the division between body and soul, and more seriously the self-division required by dialogue poetry, these are undoubtedly another Auschwitz for Celan. In Celan's seemingly broken and obscure poems, there is a revelation of a deeper existential consciousness, which is an artistic difficulty that a poet needs to pay a huge price to achieve. It can even be said that every one of his seemingly "unreadable" poems, even every line, reflects a kind of painstaking artistic craftsmanship and a high degree of uncompromising personal originality. His poems may seem strange and uninterpretable, but they always point to a tragic core, just as his exploration of language and form always corresponds to the requirements of a more inner life. The rare access to the heart of suffering and the core of language that he embodies is unmatched by any textual theory or language philosophy.

The outstanding artistic characteristics of Celan's poetry are its brevity, difficulty, and distinct feeling. The fragmentation of language gives the language a unique sense of defamiliarization. He said: "Feeling is generated and given life. Above these two is the only criterion for artwork." As he himself said, language is the only undamaged thing left to him after the war. The poem tells only what he heard in the deep sea, many silences and many happenings. There are no clichés in his poems, there are real faces of images everywhere, the words used are so surprising that they appear absurd, and "paradoxical rhetorical devices" can often be seen.

In the world of words built by Celan, every word is a self-emergence of his dark space, coming from ancient symbol worship. Every word is an endless abyss, self-organized, and repeated forever.

He emphasized that "poetry is lonely" and emphasized the individuality and uniqueness of poetry; however, he did not advocate absolute closure: "note that poetry tries to give all the attention to those who meet it", "Poetry does not stop because of this, it is right here, at the moment of encounter - in the secret of the encounter" - with whom? With the reader, with the bosom friend. This shows that he still has this "encounter" in his mind and is trying to attract his attention. "Don't blame us for our lack of clarity, it's our professionalism." He cited Pascal's famous saying to defend himself.

Professor Festinar, a Celan researcher, made an interesting statement: Modernism began with Baudelaire and ended with Celan. Because of Celan's in-depth exploration of language, he played a pioneering role in postmodernist poetry, especially the American Linguistic School, which regarded Celan as its master.

10 Poems by Paul Celan

1. "Corner of the Fog"

The mouth in the hidden mirror,

bends to the pillar of self-esteem,

grasps the bars of the cage:

Say my name,

Lead me to Him.

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

2. "Crystal"

Don't look for your lips on my lips

Don't wait for strangers in front of the door

Don't look for tears in your eyes

The seven nights are higher, the red is heading towards the red

The seven hearts are deeper, the hands are knocking on the door

The seven roses are even later, splashing the spring water at night

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(Wang Jiaxin translation)

3. "You Were"

You were my death

You, I can hold on to

When everything is lost from me

(Wang Jiaxin translation)

4. "In the River"

In the future river of the north

I cast this net, it is you

Hesitant and heavy

Written in Stone

Shadow

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

5. "I Can Still See You"

I Can Still See You: A Response

In those words that can grope for direction secretly with the tentacles of insects, in separation ridge.

Your face is quite frightened

When suddenly

There is a light shining

Accommodate me, exactly at a certain point

There, the most painful person is saying, never

(Wang Jiaxin translation)

6. "Pale Voice"

Pale voice, stripped from

the depths

Wordless, nothing

And they** *With a name

You can fall

You can fly

A world of pain

Harvest of pain

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

7. "You Can"

You can with confidence

Treat me with snow:

Whenever I stand side by side with the mulberry tree

Slow down Slowly moving through summer,

its tenderest leaves

scream.

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

8. "The Eye of Time"

This is the eye of time:

It squints outward

from under the colorful eyebrows.

Its curtains are washed by fire,

Its tears are hot steam.

Toward it, blind stars are flying

And melting on the more burning eyelashes:

The world is getting hotter day by day

And The dead

budded and blossomed.

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

9. "Standing"

Standing, in the shadow of the scar

in the air.

Stand, not for anything or anyone.

Unrecognizable,

Just

for you.

With everything that has a hiding place,

No need for

words.

(Translated by Wang Jiaxin)

10. "Death"

Death is a flower that only blooms once

It blooms like this, It does not open like itself

It opens, it opens at the first thought, it does not open in time

Here it comes, a huge butterfly

Detailed decoration Long reed stem

Let me make a reed stem, so strong that it likes it