ABSTRACT
When Paul Celan (1920-1970) committed suicide, he probably jumped off the Pont Mirabeau, the Parisian bridge to which one of his favorite poets, Apollinaire, had devoted a particularly melodious, melancholy love poem. “Et comme l’Espérance est violente,” observes Apollinaire in “Le Pont Mirabeau,” “And how Hope is violent.” The line sums up Celan’s own troubled life, his bleak, yearning poetry, perhaps also his desperate attempts to break out of his “masticated tristesse” and love others, notably his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Although his poetic oeuvre courageously engages with the Holocaust (in which his parents perished) and with the redoubtable task of writing German verse “after Auschwitz,” much of his later, vertiginously polysemous work—with its multiple “you’s”—also explores, cryptically, love’s possibilities. As Celan despaired deeply, he also hoped violently.
