Poems of Holocaust Remembrance

In honor of Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel - host Marcela Sulak reads poetry by Paul Celan, including his famous “Death Fugue.”

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Czernowitcz in 1920. The death of his parents in the Holocaust, and his imprisonment in a Romanian work camp are the defining forces in his poetry and use of language. Celan wrote in German. According to Pierre Joris, who translated Celan’s later poetry, he “harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through a “dismantling and rewelding” of German.”

Texts: Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. Translated by John Felstiner. W.W. Norton & Co. 2001 Poems of Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. Persea Press, 1995.

Music: Felix Mendelssohn - Prelude & Fugue in E Minor, op.35 no.1 Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.19 no.6 in G Minor Felix Mendelssohn - Songs Without Words, op.30 no.6 in F Sharp Minor