The New York Times:

Pierre Joris, a poet and translator who tackled some of the 20th century’s most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 78.

His wife, Nicole Peyraffite, said the cause was complications of cancer.

Mr. Joris was the author of dozens of volumes of his own poetry and prose. But much of his life’s work was spent grappling with the poetry of Celan, whom many critics considered, in the words of one scholar, “arguably the greatest European poet in the postwar period.”

That greatness comes with a hitch for readers, though: the fiendish difficulty of a writer whose lyrics were formed and deformed by the crucible of the Holocaust — “that which happened,” as Celan termed it. Both his parents were murdered by the Nazis in what is now Romania. Less than 30 years later, Celan put an end to his own life in France, jumping into the Seine river in 1970 at the age of 49.