Dr. Jack Ross

Massey University

Paul Celan’s correspondence with his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, was published in 2001 in a sumptuously-annotated two-volume edition edited by Bertrand Badiou and the poet’s son Eric Celan (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). The real revelation of the book, though, is how much of their communication went on through the medium of poetry.

Paul was well aware of his wife’s lack of fluency in German, so he almost invariably appended a literal, word-for-word French translation of each poem he sent her, as well as a short glossary of unfamiliar terms. These may have been intended initially as language aids for Gisèle, but as time went on and their relationship grew more vexed, the steady stream of poems showed no signs of drying up. Even after they separated in the late sixties, Paul kept on sending her poems: more of them now, since he saw her less often.

In my paper, I’ll be expanding on two major aspects of the correspondence:

1/ The crucial importance of both languages, French and German, in Paul Celan’s life and poetic practice.

2/ The implications of these letters for our understanding of his views on the nature of translation, a subject previously approached mainly through the two volumes of collected translations (from a variety of languages) included in his Complete Works.