Shakespeare’s Sonnet 5

Paul Celan (1920–1970) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest German-language poets. He was born to Jewish parents in Czernowitz, then part of Romania. He lost his parents to the Nazi genocide and was himself a survivor of a forced-labor camp. After brief periods in postwar Bucharest and Vienna, he settled in Paris, where, alongside his work as a poet, he taught German at the École Normale Supérieure and translated from many languages. He died of suicide.

Paul Franz is a writer and editor based in Toronto. He writes: “In 1964, for the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Paul Celan published eighteen translations of the English poet’s sonnets into German. Celan reprinted this selection, increased by three, under the title Einundzwanzig Sonette (Twenty-one Sonnets) in 1967. The present re-translation is an attempt to make perceptible, for English-language readers, the most overtly transformative of Celan’s refractions: his version of Sonnet 5. My version is based on the German text as it appears in Celan’s Gesammelte Werke, Band V (Suhrkamp, 1983). I am indebted especially to David Kramer and Steven J. Willett for their helpful criticism.” (updated 4/2011)