La «testa di Medusa». Rifrazioni e anamorfosi ideologiche intorno a «Il Tango della Morte» in Paul Celan

The article The Head of Medusa provides the context surrounding the process of creation of Celan's Todestango (Tangoul Morţii). I argue that the poem is a translation which Celan made together with his friend Petre Solomon, and published on 2 May 1947 in the Bucharest Marxist review Contemporanul, before the publication of the German poem with the definitive title Todesfuge. Compiling textual evidence from texts by Emil Cioran, Dan Botta, Mircea Eliade, Furio Jesi and Paul Celan himself, and matching it with historical references of the WWII, Holocaust, and its aftermath, I read the Romanian version of the poem as a an anamorphic and parodist representation of legionaries’ Sacrifical-Death. They were ready to sacrifice everything, with the exception of the sacrifice itself, playing the role of the victim and the oppressor at the same time.