The German-language poet Paul Celan has almost achieved the status of a living classic in spite of, or perhaps because of poetry that nearly defies access. Critics generally agree that he traces his intellectual ancestry from a heritage of hermetic brilliance with antecedents in Hölderlin and Trakl as well as in the European symbolist tradition. Celan has indirectly acknowledged the latter debt in his translations from French and Russian symbolism. But two closely related factors in Celan's background have almost escaped notice, perhaps because they are so foreign to the mainstream of German letters: the mystical tradition of Eastern European Judaism embodied in Hasidism, and the thought of this tradition as refined and transmitted to the twentieth century by Martin Buber….

In nearly all Celan's works since the mid 1940's he undertakes something poetically quite similar to what Buber characterizes as the religious quest for a Thou...