This book is the first critical biography of Paul Celan, a German- speaking East European Jew who was Europe's most compelling postwar poet. It tells the story of Celan's life, offers new translations of his poems, and illuminates the connection between Celan's lived experience and his poetry.

Felstiner's (English and Jewish studies, Stanford Univ.) literary biography is an engagement with Celan as a man and as a poet. His descriptions of the allusions and the translation problems of the great poems "Death Fugue," "The Vintagers," "Tenebrae," and "Stretto" are models of sympathetic reading. Celan's work as a translator (especially of Osip Mandelstam) and his friendship with Nelly Sachs are given the importance they are due. The difficult and hermetic late poems are worked through carefully. Celan was a successor to Holderlin as a German poet, and as a Jewish poet he was influenced by Buber's ideas of redemption through history and language.