Article: Translation as reversion: Paul Celan's Jerusalem poems.

IN 1933, THREATENED BY NAZISM, AN AUNT WHO had lived with Paul Celan's family during his childhood emigrated to Palestine. That year the boy also was Bar Mitzvah, and shortly afterward wrote to her about anti-Semitism in his school. He closed this letter to Palestine (his earliest extant writing) by asking his aunt how it's going with the languages: "Speake-you English?," he wrote, "Und Hebraisch?" I like to take this German-speaker's solicitude about English and Hebrew as a kind of warrant for my own need to translate Paul Celan and find the strain of Jewishness in him.

In 1938 Celan's own family might have emigrated to Palestine from Czernowitz, capital of Bukovina ...

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