Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedächtnis)
Celan was a Romanian Jew whose parents died in Nazi death camps; he survived and wrote in German, the language of the murderers. "Death Fugue," the collection's centerpiece, is the defining poem of the Holocaust: "Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening." Its fugue structure (repeating, inverting, building) enacts what it describes. Celan's impossibility, writing in German about what German had done, became his subject and his torment. He drowned in the Seine in 1970.
'Death Fugue' swallowed the book that contains it. Celan himself came to distrust the poem's beauty and stopped reading it aloud, uneasy that its incantatory music made the camps consumable. The surrounding lyrics, dense early surrealism, get skipped on the way to the anthology piece. In translation the German's terrible doubleness, the whole point, goes missing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
