Corona And Paul Celan Or Love And Pandemic/ Corona ve Paul Celan Ya da Aşk ve Pandemi

Abstract

The year 2020 has already taken place in history pages as a year of pandemic in which the coronavirus outbreak has taken millions of lives all over the world. This year also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the death of Paul Celan (1920-1970), one of the well-known poets of the post-war Austrian lyric. Interestingly, Celan named his poem Corona, which he wrote seventy-two years ago. The year 1948 corresponds to three years after the end of the Second World War in world history. In Celan’s personal history these years coincide with tough times, when he emigrated to Czernowitz, Bucharest and then Vienna after surviving the Nazi death camp where his parents were sacrificed. The friendships that Celan built here with the writers around the literature in Vienna, especially meeting the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), constitute a turning point in his life. Two great poets experience passionate love. This poem of Celan carries traces of this stormy love in 1948. The main purpose of this study is to analyze this poem and also to investigate whether there is a relationship between Corona and Celan’s poem with the same title, which is known as the name of the pandemic virus that has killed millions of people today. In this way, it is aimed to draw attention to both the poetry of the master poet, who entered the 50th year of his death in 2020, and the epidemic of the Corona virus that threatened all humanity. In this study, an eclectic method including “close reading”, historical positivist, biographical critism and hermeneutic methods has been used.

Keywords

• celan
• austrian literature
• corona
• love
• pandemic