Yvan Goll, born Isaac Lange (Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, 29 March 1891 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 27 February 1950), was a French-German poet who was perfectly bilingual and wrote in both French and German. He had close ties to both to German expressionism and to French surrealism.
Born in the Vosges, he became a naturalized German citizen when his mother joined relatives in Metz, then part of in German Lorraine. He escaped to Switzerland to avoid conscription at the outbreak of World War I and became friends with the dadaists of Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, in particular Hans Arp. He wrote many war poems, the most famous being "Requiem for the Dead of Europe," as well as several plays, including The Immortal One (1918).
In 1917 he met Claira Aischmann and in 1919 they settled in Paris, marrying in 1921. In Paris he worked as a translator into German (Blaise Cendrars and Ulysses, among others) and into French, adapting Georg Kaiser's Fire at the Opera (Der Brand im Opernhaus, 1919) for Théâtre de l'Œuvre. He formed many friendships with artists and his collection The New Orpheus was illustrated by Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Marc Chagall illustrated a collection of love poems by both Golls, and Pablo Picasso illustrated Yvan's Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre (1949; "Elegy of Ihpetonga and Masks of Ashes").
In 1927, he wrote the libretto for a surrealist opera, Royal Palace, set to music by composer Kurt Weill. He also wrote the scenario for Der Neue Orpheus, a cantata set by Weill, and the opera Mélusine, set by Marcel Mihalovici in 1920 and again, this time in German, by Aribert Reimann in 1971.
From 1939-1947 the Golls were exiles in New York, where friends included Richard Wright, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, Piet Mondrian, and William Carlos Williams who translated some of Yvan's poems. Between 1943 and 1946, Goll edited the French-American poetry magazine Hémispheres.[1] In 1945, the year he was diagnosed with leukemia, he wrote Atom Elegy and other death-haunted poems collected in the English language volume Fruit From Saturn (1946). Love Poems, written with his wife Claire, appeared in 1947. Goll died in 1950 in Paris, and was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery opposite the grave of Frederic Chopin.
In the 1950s, his widow accused his friend, the poet Paul Celan of having plagiarised her husband's work.[2]
Goll once described his situation as "By fate a Jew, by an accident born in France, on paper a German."