Paul Celan (pronounced say-lahn ), whom George Steiner has called "almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945," is known primarily for his verse. Yet his reputation as a lyric poet overshadows a small but significant body of prose works that deserve attention both for their close links to his poetry and as independent creations.

Paul Antschel, the only child of Jewish parents, Leo Antschel-Teitler and Friederike Schrager, was born in Czernovitz (now Cherniutsi, Ukraine), capital of the Romanian province of Bukovina, on 23 November 1920. He grew up in a multilingual environment. German, the language spoken at home and in some of the schools he attended, remained his mother tongue throughout his life, and Vienna was the cultural lodestar of his youth; but his language of daily speech was Romanian. Before his bar mitzvah he studied Hebrew for three years, and by the time he began a...