Paul Celan
Yesterday, on the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year, I discovered a new poet. Paul Celan is not new to the world, but he’s new to me.
I subscribe to a daily literary quote via e-mail and yesterday’s was a passage from a poem by Paul Celan that begins, “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night.” I love the imagery. Last night I was in my used bookshop and I happened to come across a book entitled The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. I was flipping through the book when I saw Paul Celan’s name and the full poem of the passage I had read, entitled Fugue of Death. I stood there and read the poem in its entirety and thought, whoa, this is excellent. The book had a few more of his poems, very brief compositions which I read and thought this man’s words are profound and chilling.
I researched him online and learned he was born in Romania into a German-speaking Jewish family, had escaped from a Nazi camp, fell in with the avant-garde crowd in Paris and committed suicide in 1970. Fugue of Death is his most well-known poem, about war and the labor camps. I had never heard of him before and now I’m obsessed with him. Today I ordered a used copy of the Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.
I love discoveries.