Letters to Gisèle: 19511970

Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s. One of the most significant European poets of the twentieth century, Paul Celan came from an Eastern European Jewish family and lost his parents to the death camps of World War II. Transplanted to Paris, he produced a body of work that was an ongoing confrontation with that history of loss and with the German language. His poems, anguished and unsleeping, have by now been translated into many languages, becoming a touchstone for poets, writers, and philosophers. Letters to Gis le presents the letters Celan wrote to his wife, the French visual artist Gis le Celan-Lestrange, over the course of close to twenty years, along with letters to the couple's son, Eric, and letters from Gis le to Paul. They provide an intimate view of his literary career and troubled life, which was marked by repeated stays in psychiatric clinics. They also provide an unparalleled glimpse into Celan's poetic workshop, including his own word-for-word renderings from German into French of more than a dozen of his poems. These he addressed to Gis le as an ongoing, informal German lesson. They figure too as messages from the heart. Presented here trilingually, these overlapping versions of Celan's poems open up new dimensions of his famously hermetic poetry, as dazzling as it is dark. This edition includes some poems in the original German and Celan's own translations of them.

About the Author :
Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Romania to German-speaking Jewish parents. During World War II, his parents were deported to and eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp, and Celan himself was interned for eighteen months. Celan settled in Paris after the war, where he worked as a poet and translator, translating a wide range of works, including poetry by Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Baudelaire. Celan received the 1958 Bremen Prize for German Literature and the 1960 Georg Buchner Prize, and he taught German language and literature at the cole Normale Superieure until his death in 1970. Jason Kavett received his PhD in German from Yale University. He lives and works in Paris. Bertrand Badiou is the co-director of the Paul Celan Department at the cole normale superieure in Paris and editor of Celan's works and letters in Germany (Suhrkamp Verlag) and France ( ditions du Seuil). Together with Eric Celan he manages the poet's estate.

Review :
“[These letters and poems] form a tragic love story of the twentieth century as well as a unique biography of Celan himself.... A kind of Rosetta Stone, invaluable for comprehending his elusive verse.” —John Felstiner “Paul Celan’s letters to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange [are] by far the most extensive and revealing part of his correspondence as a whole.”—Charlie Louth, The Times Literary Supplement “Letters to Gisèle presents an opportunity for anglophone readers to glimpse Celan’s personal tribulations within the context of his poetic calling as they played out in his relation to his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and their son, Eric.” —Rain Taxi “The letters, which span almost twenty years, illuminate Celan’s twin reckonings: poetry and parenthood after the Shoah—two refusals of erasure, two impossible reaches toward continuity across rupture.” —Benjamin Balint, Jewish Review of Books