[ A] sensitive portrayal of the magisterial poet and Holocaust survivorA thoughtful, well-crafted life of a man once hailed as the 'greatest living poet in the German language. * Kirkus Reviews * Celans multilingual precocity; his good fortune in evading the Nazi death camps; his love affairs with intelligent women, principally with Ingeborg Bachmann; his marriage to the long-suffering Gisèle Lestrange; the campaign of slander launched against him by the widow of Yvan Goll; his embattled relations with Germany, the German language, and his German readership; his exploits as a translator; his embrace of Zionism; his descent into madness and eventual suicideall these aspects of Celans life are explored in depth and with sympathy in Anna Arno's exemplary biography. -- J. M. Coetzee Anna Arno's richly detailed account of Paul Celan's life illuminates the contexts of the achingly modern poems that made him an indelible poet of the Holocaust, and perhaps his century's most haunting ghost. -- Mark Doty In this penetrating, fully realized, and unflinching biography, sensitively translated by Soren Gauger, Anna Arno has fleshed out Celans notoriously spare and difficult poetry with a complete cultural context, so it can reside more deeply and fully in us, his destined readers. -- Edward Hirsch A sweeping, tragic biography of a poet haunted by history. Arno shows how Celans most famous poem, 'Todesfuge' ('Deathfugue'), and his later, more radical work are not only acts of grief but acts of resistance: attempts to reforge the German language after Auschwitz, to speak the unspeakable. -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath A lucid, exquisitely rendered biography. Arno lays bare the tensions that animate Celans poetry, inviting us to consider why the Jewish polyglots decision after the Holocaust to write in Germanhis mother tonguewas a radical act of reclamation. -- Rebecca Donner, author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days
