Paul Ancel (“Celan”) was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernovitz, in the then Kingdom of Romania, (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine). He studied medicine in France but returned to Romania shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Celan studied literature and Romance languages in Bukovina, when it was occupied by the Soviets and subsequently, in 1941, invaded by the Nazis. His parents were deported and killed, and he was imprisoned in a labor camp before escaping to the Red Army. After the end of World War II, Celan lived in Bucharest where he was active in the Jewish literary community as both a translator of Russian literature into Romanian, and as a poet. In 1947, a version of his famous poem Todesfuge (Death Fugue) appeared as Tangoul Morţii (Death Tango) in a Romanian translation. This was also the year in which he adopted the pseudonym Celan—an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his last name. On the emergence of the communist regime in Bucharest, Celan fled Romania for Vienna. It was there that he befriended the poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

Unwilling to live in a city divided between occupying powers, he emigrated to Paris in 1948. In that year, his first poetry collection, Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand from the Urns) appeared, inaugurating the stream of ten books of poetry that established his recognition as one of the foremost poets of the German language. He took his Licence des Lettres in 1950 while working on his second poetry collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), which appeared in 1952. As Celan’s poetry began to gain international fame he was invited to read at one of the semiannual meetings of the Gruppe 47. Further poetry collections from the 1950s include Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold, 1955) and Sprachgitter (Speech Grille, 1959). In 1959, Celan took a position as a reader in German Language and Literature at L’École Normal Superieure of the University of Paris, which he would hold until his death. He was also active as a translator, bringing out works from Osip Mandelstam, René Char, and Paul Valéry, among others. In 1960, Celan received the Georg-Büchner Prize, one of the highest literary honors for German-language poets. During the 1960s, Celan published Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose, 1963), Atemwende (Breathturn, 1967), Fadensonnen (Threadsuns, 1968), and Lichtzwang (Lightduress, 1970). His works Schneepart (Snow Part, 1971) and Zeitgehöft (Timestead, 1976) appeared posthumously. Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in Paris, in 1970.