Abstract

The chapter focuses on three poems Celan write for his thirteen-year-old son, Eric, in 1968. These poems are read against the background of the May '68 student uprisings in Paris, in which both father and son took part; in the context of the poet's own increasingly unstable mental condition and the potential danger he came to pose to his wife, his son and himself; and in view of the poet's suicide less than two years later. Of particular relevance to the poems written at this time was the delusion from which Celan suffered that poetry was demanding of him that he re-perform "the sacrifice of Abraham," that, in short, he was being made to choose between poetry and his son. The chapter examines the various ways Celan sought to negotiate this "terrible alternative" as he wrote poems to and about his son, about the relationship between poetry and paternity, but also and perhaps above all about translation and a time to come.

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