Letters to Gisèle

by Paul Celan, Jason Kavett (Translator)

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 Gisèle presents the letters Celan wrote to his wife, the French visual artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, over the course of close to twenty years, along with letters to the couple’s son, Eric, and letters from Gisèle 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 Gisèle 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.

Genres: Poetry

544 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 25, 2025

About the author

Poet, translator, essayist, and lecturer, influenced by French Surrealism and Symbolism. Celan was born in Cernăuţi, at the time Romania, now Ukraine, he lived in France, and wrote in German. His parents were killed in the Holocaust; the author himself escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. "Death is a Master from Germany", Celan's most quoted words, translated into English in different ways, are from the poem 'Todesfuge' (Death Fugue). Celan's body was found in the Seine river in late April 1970, he had committed suicide.

Reviews

[Colin Wells]

a quite upsetting read. hard not to compare the early letters of their relationship (lengthy, excited, somewhat flowery discussions) and the letters in the late 60s (short, primarily banal discussions of his rapidly declining wellbeing, interspersed with brief moments of quiet devastation). the simplification of the language and impossibility of communication towards the end really do mimic his poetic development in a lot of ways.

illegibility of this
world. everything double.

the powerful clocks
concede to the hour of division,
hoarsely.

you, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
forever.

[Alexa Doran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book absolutely haunted me.

Some editorials choices I did not understand. Why are you making us read entire letters as footnotes?? So much - too much - is in that tiny ass footnote font. So much of what's in the footnotes is as important as the letters, why diminish it?

Some editorial choices I celebrate deeply, so deeply. Including which lines Celan had underlined in the texts he was reading at the time was SUCH AN AMAZING ADDITION. Thank you for this. Including the German, French, and English translations also added so much.

Impossible not to be pulled into their love affair, their tragedies. The whole book is alive. A new favorite for my collection.