The significance of Osip Mandelstam for Paul Celan

This article follows the development of Celan’s poetic quest in order to understand why, since the late 1950s, he felt close to Osip Mandelstam’s poetics, as well as to Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on language and finitude, and Martin Buber’s dialogism. Although his relationship to Heidegger and Buber has been at the centre stage of Celan studies for decades, the importance of his readings of Mandelstam have not been sufficiently attended to. Understanding his connection to Mandelstam and Russian acmeism can illuminate more profoundly the role Heidegger and Buber play in his reflections on poetics. The way acmeists ‘digested’, to use an anthropophagic term, Baudelaire’s symbolism, was critical for Celan to value a poetics of existence over a poetics of formal experimentation, the latter is what his contemporaries were interested in exploring as they followed Mallarme’s legacy, criticised by Celan in The Meridian speech he gave in 1960.