Paul Celan, was born Paul Antschel in Czernovitz, in Romania, on November 23, 1920. 'The son of German-speaking Jews, Celan grew up speaking several languages, including Romanian, Russian, and French. He also understood Yiddish. He studied medicine in Paris in 1938, but returned to Romania shortly before the outbreak of World War II. His parents were deported and eventually died in Nazi labor camps; Celan himself was interned for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army. In 1945, he moved to Bucharest and became friends with many of the leading Romanian writers of the time. He worked as a reader in a publishing house and as a translator. He also began to publish his own poems and translations under a series of pseudonyms. In 1947 he settled on the pseudonym Celan - an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his surname .(http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/316 sighted 16/01/2009)
Those poems by Celan included in AustLit have been translated by Australian poets
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