Osip Mandelstam

Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were surprised to be told that the excruciatingly introverted German-language instructor they had been avoiding in the corridors for several years was ‘the greatest living poet in the German language’. Paul Celan was reputed to be as ‘difficult’ as his poetry – rebarbative, then intriguing and finally unforgettable. His best known poem is ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which may refer to Jewish musicians in a Nazi death camp: ‘Black milk of dawn, we drink you at night...’ He can be heard online reciting the poem in a rising tone of suppressed hysteria.

It sometimes seems that those people chosen to be subjects for biographies are drawn from a strictly limited cast. Every few years, another book about Tolstoy, Dickens or some other great literary figure comes along to make library shelves groan further. At a recent talk given for a new biography of George Orwell, I asked the author why he had felt a need to add to the pile, given the plethora of perfectly good existing ones. ‘Because OUP commissioned me,’ was the answer. I didn’t buy the book. So how refreshing that Miranda Seymour should choose an absolute unknown to write about, whose life was genuinely interesting and surprising.