Driving west toward L.A. on U.S. 66 out of Winslow, Arizona, on Christmas morning 1967, I was accompanied by my friend Pierre Joris, whom I had met just a few months earlier when he arrived from Paris as a transfer student at Bard College. Pierre was 21 and I was 20 and we were both aspiring poets, so on a campus of fewer than 600 students where I was the editor of the literary magazine, we connected right away. Even though it was his fourth language — after his native Luxembourgish, French and German — he was already writing in English and he was committed, as I was, to learning as much as we could and making the most of our nascent vocation.

We had set out from New York three nights before in a torrential rainstorm in my 1964 black Porsche coupe I’d bought used off the lot at Bob Smith Volkswagen in Hollywood and driven across the country that summer for the fall semester. Pierre, in the states for the first time, was on his maiden American road trip. Even in the downpour on the Jersey Turnpike in the drenching wakes of semis we were fearless and we felt indestructible. Taking turns at the wheel we were making good time as we pulled into Winslow on Christmas Eve.

It was very cold and had been snowing in Arizona but the day broke clear with a dazzling blue sky and the highway had been plowed and was lined with snowbanks about 3 feet deep. I was driving and was doing maybe 70, only a little over the speed limit, when we hit a patch of black ice and skidded off the road into a snowbank, rolled two or three times — it felt like an eternity — and landed right side up. We weren’t wearing seatbelts. We looked at each other: “Are you OK?” Somehow we were, not a scratch on either of us. Dumb luck? A miracle? Our deathless poetic destiny? (Or were we dead and didn’t know it?)

Reading The New York Times the other day I had the wind knocked out of me by the sight of Pierre’s obituary. Over the years we had stayed in touch from time to time, though our similar paths took different directions — mine mainly in California with travels to mostly Spanish-speaking countries, his all over Europe and North Africa, where he added Arabic to his collection of languages. After his Ph.D. he had a lengthy career as a professor at SUNY Albany, not far from Bard. He published a lot of books — poetry, essays, translations, anthologies — but his main claim to fame was his 50-year project making English versions of the poems of Paul Celan, published finally by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in a 600-page tome titled “Breathturn into Timestead.”

Celan was a Romanian-German Holocaust survivor, one of the most original and untranslatable 20th-century poets, whose verse stretches, twists and presses the German language to its richest depths and edges of expression. Pierre invented a comparably complex, compressed, suggestive and sinewy English that echoes the original to stunning effect. His monumental work earned him critical accolades and awards, as well as that obit in the Times. He credited his fluency as a translator to his trilingual upbringing, which led him to reject the very idea of a “mother tongue” and to intuitively grasp the polysemiology of any idiom.

He wrote to me last September from his home in Brooklyn; he was working on a memoir and wanted to check his recollection of the crash that bonded us for a lifetime. He told me he had cancer but was “not doing too badly” thanks to the specialists at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

The Pierre I’ll always remember is the golden boy who blew into Bard with his curly blond locks and sky-blue eyes and beautiful pale face flushed with pink and his ambiguous French-German accent; whose cheerful, mischievous charisma, self-confidence and continental sophistication made him a babe magnet and a romantic mirror of my own imaginings and aspirations.

So long, Pierre. It was a privilege to be your peer.

Stephen Kessler is the author or translator of more than 30 books of poetry and prose. His column appears on Saturdays.