Pierre Joris, Translator of the ‘Impossible' Paul Celan, Dies at 78

New York Times

05-03-2025

Pierre Joris, a poet and translator who tackled some of the 20th century's most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 78.
His wife, Nicole Peyraffite, said the cause was complications of cancer.
Mr. Joris was the author of dozens of volumes of his own poetry and prose. But much of his life's work was spent grappling with the poetry of Celan, whom many critics considered, in the words of one scholar, 'arguably the greatest European poet in the postwar period.'
That greatness comes with a hitch for readers, though: the fiendish difficulty of a writer whose lyrics were formed and deformed by the crucible of the Holocaust — 'that which happened,' as Celan termed it. Both his parents were murdered by the Nazis in what is now Romania. Less than 30 years later, Celan put an end to his own life in France, jumping into the Seine river in 1970 at the age of 49.
In between, he felt he had to invent a new version of German, the cultured language he was brought up in as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Czernowitz (now part of Ukraine). But it had to be cleansed of Nazi barbarism.
The result would be 'truly an invented German,' as Mr. Joris (pronounced JOR-iss) wrote in the introduction to 'Breathturn Into Timestead' (2014), his translations of Celan's later works.
A public reading of Celan's best-known work, the hypnotic 'Death Fugue,' was 'an epiphany' for Mr. Joris as a 15-year-old high school student in his native Luxembourg, he told the New York State Writers Institute in 2014. The poem was inspired by the murder of Celan's mother in 1942.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.