Paul Celan and Surrealism

This essay tries to emphasize the strong connections between Paul Celan’s poetic writing and Surrealism. The poet suffered the major influence of Surrealist aesthetics in the years spent in Bucharest (1945-1947), when he participated in the meetings of the Romanian Surrealist group made of the poets Gellu Naum, Gherasim Luca, Paul Paun and Virgil Teodorescu and the painetr Dolfi Trost. Nevertheless, not only his Romanian writings but also his German poems were influenced by Surrealism, as they mixed his main obsessions (the Jewish tragic condition, the Holocaust, the impossible love, the hopeless suffering, etc.) in a continuous discourse that follows the same dream-like logic according to the Freudian mechanism of displacement, condensation and secondary elaboration. And his last poems combined foreign words and phrases taken from other languages in a deliberately eccentric German, this kind of approach being in a perfect agreement with the so-called ‘language deterritorialization’ done at the same time by Gherasim Luca, who invented an original poetic manner called by Gilles Deleuze ‘prodigious stuttering’.