“Paul Celan’s poems reach us, but we miss them,” wrote the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, giving succinct expression to the allure of one of Europe’s most important postwar poets, who remains as intriguing as he is perplexing more than 50 years after his death.
Born to a German-speaking Jewish family in 1920, Celan grew up in Chernivtsi, a city that passed from Austria-Hungary to Nazi Germany to Soviet Ukraine. Amid such linguistic ferment, he developed his own sharp-edged language to preserve his impressions of a darkening world. He took German’s facility for creating compound nouns, adjectives and adverbs to its breaking point, coining hundreds of neologisms that would become the most distinctive characteristic of his work. His “lunatic bowls,” “word-cave” and “wound-fathoming eyelash” — to take a few examples — are haunting, but what do they mean?
Attempts at answers often lean heavily on the two cardinal realities of Celan’s life. The first is the murder of his parents during the Holocaust. The second is his descent into madness, which would end in his suicide in 1970.
The problem is not that these explanations can be easily dismissed; it is that any interpretation based on them drapes itself in a solemnity nearly immune to skepticism. And yet, in Celan’s lifetime, nearly all that readers had to go on were these two weighty life events, along with his insistence on writing in German, despite what he saw as its contamination by the Nazis and despite his living most of his adult life in France.
Celan’s name is near synonymous with his most famous and, not incidentally, most readily graspable poem, “Death Fugue,” written in 1944 or ’45. It is an early and powerful refutation of a sentiment Theodor Adorno would express in the famous phrase “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,” and accomplishes what would become one of the central tasks of 20th-century art: to relate and commemorate disaster without cheapening it through sentimentality.
Drawing on accounts of Jewish orchestras at Nazi extermination camps, “Death Fugue” is an ordeal in thudding verse. As it grew more famous, Celan distanced himself from it, eventually refusing to read it in public. According to a friend, “it had become something like a badge of atonement, and for him, that was intolerable.” It contrasts with his later poems, which are tightly compressed, cryptic, stark, with fragmentary descriptions of impossible landscapes strewn with inconceivable objects.
The autobiographical underpinnings of that work were beyond the reach of general readers until the 1990s, when the thousands of pages of Celan’s letters began to appear. The scholar Bertrand Badiou compiled the poet’s correspondence with his wife, the French graphic artist Gisèle Lestrange-Celan, and that collection was released in 2001. LETTERS TO GISÈLE (NYRB Poets, 533 pp., $28) is now available for the first time in English, translated by Jason Kavett.
At 416 pages, it omits much that is available in the French and German editions, including notes, photos and surprising bits of trivia (for example, that Celan translated a poem by John Updike that appears in the latter’s novel “The Poorhouse Fair”). Still, this edition is an invaluable window onto the years from 1951 to 1970, when all but one of Celan’s books were written, and frequently offers keys to obscure passages in his work.
Some of the more tempting parallels tend toward the literal. A line like “Love, straitjacket-beautiful/bears down on the marriage of cranes,” becomes clearer when we learn that Celan himself was put in a straitjacket and interned after he attempted to murder his wife during a mental breakdown. A poem that speaks of a wild heart “tamed/by a purblind stab/in the lung” evokes the night when Celan locked himself in his office and plunged a letter opener into his chest, just barely missing his heart.
The letters also chronicle a love story, tainted by infidelities barely alluded to but plainly felt, frayed by the impossibility of managing the poet’s crumbling psyche. The early pages abound with romantic declarations, pet names, expressions of longing. He sent Gisèle poems in German, with his accompanying French translations. Adding a third language, English, to these is cumbersome but illuminating, and gives readers a chance to see Celan’s work evolving.
Over the years, Celan’s hospitalizations stretched on for months. At times, Gisèle was told not to visit him; other times, she was too scared. Celan described his ailment as Beziehungswahn, or relational delirium, a kind of paranoia first diagnosed in the early days of psychoanalysis. Nowadays, its symptoms are usually attributed to schizoaffective disorder.
He may have received electroshock therapy, and was injected with large doses of insulin in a now-discredited remedy that left him sluggish and apathetic. Antipsychotics and antidepressants made these side effects worse.
For a poet, this was devastating, and Celan complains in his letters of his struggles to write and his failing memory. He mentions the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac to suggest that he must sacrifice his poetry to salvage his relationship with his son, Eric.
His late years were nonetheless fruitful, almost desperately so, and there is a kind of perverse comedy in the contrast between Gisèle’s patient encouragement and Celan’s inscrutable poetic replies, such as:
from the ice opposite
nods the most self-
and other-dangerous of all
names
Only rarely did Gisèle make pleas for compassion. “It’s not easy for me either, you know,” she wrote in 1966.
Not all in the letters is passion and turmoil. Celan supported himself through teaching and literary translation, and the life of a translator (I speak from experience) is one of scrounging and waiting, of taking what comes. Celan loved Emily Dickinson, Osip Mandelstam and Shakespeare, but the things one loves don’t always pay — and so we find him working on mystery novels by Georges Simenon; “this damned Cioran translation that everyone admires”; and a 100-page document in English on fishing boat management, of which he grumbles, “the words do not come to me.”
Celan’s last letter, sent to his wife for her birthday in March 1970, begins with the question “What can I offer you, dear Gisèle?” The answer is a poem:
There will be something, later,
which fills itself with you
and hoists itself
up to a mouth
Out of shattered
madness
I stand up
and contemplate my hand,
how it traces the one,
single
circle
Unusually, the French translation Celan includes shows signs of hesitancy. He wavers between madness (folie) and delirium (délire), between looming (se dresser) and standing, or perhaps better, taking a stand (s’ériger).
Gisèle responds shortly afterward, thanking him for his words and the tulips he had apparently sent her, and wishing him well on an upcoming trip. A month later, Celan would drown himself in the Seine, jumping, almost certainly, from the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, from which a “wound-fledged” man plunges in his 1962 poem “And With the Book From Tarussa.”
The bridge between these events, the strife and sorrow that bind Celan’s poetry to his life, are at last a bit more visible in English with the publication of these letters.
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