Paul Celan

Not (quite) too late to mark the birthday of Paul Celan, born on this day in 1920. Much of his poetry - like the well-known Death Fugue - is almost too much to bear, but he somehow managed to hold on to his sanity long enough to do (or at least hint at) what he had to do. Poor Celan, one of those lives comprehensively mangled by mid-Europe's terrible 20th century...

'World to be stuttered after,
in which I'll have been
a guest, a name
sweated down from the wall
where a wound licks up high.'