One of the greatest poets to write in German and among the most gifted writers of the twentieth century in any language, Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, in 1920. He survived the Holocaust and settled in Paris in 1948, where he lived until his suicide by drowning in 1970. Pierre Joris is the author of many books of poetry as well as a range of anthologies and translations; he recently published A Nomad Poetics, a volume of essays. In 2003 he was Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is Professor of English at the State University of New York, Albany.