Paul Celan was born in Czernovitz, in Romania, in 1920. Until 1918, this region of Romania had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a polyglot amalgam of nations stretching from Austria in the west to the Balkans in the south-east. Though each region spoke its own language, and many Jewish com
As the Postmodern era moves on (or ends, no one is really sure), poetry suffers from an identity crisis. The identity narrative is over -- no one believes in a single, monolithic self thanks to the well spring of Poststructural theories. Nobody looks to poets as spiritual guides anymore -- they are a