![]() ![]() One of the great post war poets of the last century Celan, (born Paul Antschel to Jewish parents in 1920 in what was Bukovina, Romania before Soviet and German occupation) and especially his “Todesfugue” has come to represent the very symbol of Jewish suffering and plight during the Holocaust. ![]() ![]() The poetry of Paul Celan offers a site in which these two issues coincide. Hence to attempt to answer the question “what makes poetry survive?” one must confront at some stage the inevitable question of a language that has survived. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive 2Ī language that has remained is also in some ways a language that has survived. Poets- witnesses- found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or impossibility, of speaking. Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (1958)” 1 It, the language remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. By drawing attention to the French thinker Jacques Derrida’s several influential studies of Celan’s poetry on the problems of “witnessing”, “testimony” and the “idiomatic” this paper finally examines the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “remnant” to understand a poetics of survival. This paper is an attempt to explore the relation between poetry and survival taking as a point of focus the poetry of the post-war European poet Paul Celan. ![]() Dipanjan Maitra, Jadavpur University, Kolkata ![]()
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