Abend Der Worte

“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” by Paul Celan, a Jewish-Romanian poet who wrote in German, was originally published in his 1955 poetry collection From Threshold to Threshold (Von Schwelle zu Schwelle). This was Celan’s third published book of poetry.

“Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” can be read as ars poetica, a Latin term that describes a poem about the process of writing poetry. It also explores the inescapability of the past and the animalistic wildness within humans. Celan’s work is heavily metaphoric and intentionally difficult to parse; he chose to write this way as the best approach to his and his family’s lived experience of World War II and the Holocaust.

This guide refers to Pierre Joris’s translation of “Abend der Worte”/ “Evening of the Words” from Celan’s 2020 collection Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry: A Bilingual Edition.

Poet Biography

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in 1920 in Czernowitz, a city in the then Kingdom of Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). His father was a committed Zionist, and as a teenager, Celan became active in the Jewish Socialist movement. who later changed his name to Paul Ancel, and then—was born. He visited France with the intent of studying medicine there in 1938 because quotas on Jews admitted to schools prevented him from being able to study in Vienna, but returned to Czernowitz to study Romance languages and literature. In 1942, Nazis killed Celan’s parents in a Nazi internment camp in Transnistria, while Celan himself was forced into labor slavery in a Southern Moldavian work-camp.