Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, a multilingual city in the region of Bukovina, which had been part of Austria-Hungary and was then part of Romania; today it is Chernivtsi, in Ukraine. He grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family. His mother, whom he adored, loved German poetry and made sure he spoke the language perfectly.

In 1942, under the German and Romanian occupation, his parents were deported to a camp in Transnistria. His father died there of typhus, and his mother was shot. Celan, who had been away from home the night they were taken, spent the war in forced labor camps. He survived, and spent the rest of his life with the knowledge of what had happened to them.

After the war he lived briefly in Bucharest and Vienna, and in 1948 settled in Paris, where he married the artist Gisèle Lestrange and taught German at the École normale supérieure. He took the name Celan, made from the letters of the Romanian spelling of his surname, Ancel.

His most famous poem, “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), was written around 1945. It is shaped like a piece of music, with repeated phrases returning like themes, and it is spoken by prisoners in a camp: “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening.” A camp commandant who writes letters home to Germany, and plays with snakes, orders the prisoners to dig their own graves and to play music while they do it. Its refrain, “Death is a master from Germany,” became one of the best-known lines of the twentieth century.

Celan wrote his poems in German, the language of his mother and of the people who murdered her. Over time his poems grew shorter, more broken and more difficult, as if he were testing whether the language itself could still carry meaning after what it had been used for. He also translated widely into German, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the poems of Emily Dickinson and Osip Mandelstam.

He suffered from deep depression in his later years. In April 1970, he drowned himself in the Seine in Paris, at forty-nine. His poems, which once seemed impossibly obscure, are now read as some of the most important ever written about the Holocaust and its aftermath.