Sete Rosas Mais Tarde

Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz (Bukovina, Romania) in 1920 to German-Jewish parents. In 1940, Czernowitz was occupied by the Soviets and the following year by German and Romanian troops. In 1942, his parents were deported to an extermination camp, where they died a few months later. Despite surviving the Holocaust, Celan remained imprisoned in a labor camp until 1943, the year Bukovina was retaken by the Soviets.

In 1945, he moved to Bucharest where he became a translator and reader for a publishing house and published his first poems. In December 1947, he left for Vienna, and a year later for Paris, where he settled and resumed his studies (German Studies and Linguistics). Between 1950 and 1968, he published several original works and translations (Shakespeare, Henri Michaux, Paul Valéry, Pessoa, Mandelstam). In 1969, a year before his death, he visited Israel. He committed suicide in the Seine a year later.