by Paul Celan
I'll be there, next to you, in a moment, in a second that will inaugurate time
Paul
LETTER #2
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris] This Monday [1.28.1952] — 5 p.m.
Maia, my loved one, here I am writing to you, as I had promised you — how could I not write to you — I write to you to tell you that you don't stop being present, close by, that you accompany me everywhere I go, that this world is you, you alone, and that because of that it is larger, that it has found, thanks to you, a new dimension, a new coordinate, the one I could no longer bring myself to grant it, that it is no longer that implacable solitude that forced me at each moment to sack what rose in front of me, to hound myself— for I wanted to be just and spare no one! —that everything changes, changes, changes under your gaze —
My darling, I will call you a bit later, at seven, when I come out of my class, but I will not cease to think about you while waiting to call you — I worry always, less than yesterday of course, and even less than the day before yesterday, but I always worry like I have never worried about anybody — but you know that, no need to tell you —
What I have loved so far, I have loved in order to be able to love you
Paul
LETTER #3
TO ERICH EINHORN
Erich Einhorn was a close childhood friend with whom Celan had lost touch in 7947, when the former escaped Czernowitz with the retreating Soviet troops. In 1962 Celan was given Einhorn's Moscow address — the latter lived and worked there as a translator — by a common friend, and an intense if short-lived correspondence (fifteen letters in all) ensued. This is Celan's response to Einhorn'sfirst letter.
My dear Erich,
Many thanks for your letter!
I hope very much that the eye operation your mother had to undergo was successful. Give her my best wishes — I wish to see her again too in the not all too distant future.
I have just sent you my books: the volumes of my own poetry, two translations from the French (Rimbaud and Valery), two from the Russian — one of them I also sent, together with "Sprachgitter" to Nadezhda Yakovlevna —, my speech upon being given the Biichner Prize.
From the things I have put down on paper you will certainly be able to see where my life and my thoughts are. (I have never written a line that was not connected to my existence — I am, you see, a realist, in my own manner.)
I'll send you the Fischer-Dieskau records with pleasure — just give me a bit of time. Russian poetry, even recent work, is not difficult to find here, but of course I would be very thankful to you if you were to draw my attention to this or that new publication. — Nice that we both are translators — you see, there actually are no distances. If only I could count Tanja and Gustav among my readers!
My work at the Ecole Normale Superieure (45 rue d'Ulm, Paris 5) is experiencing an interruption, as I, like my boy, am on school holidays. We will go to the countryside for a few days, in Normandy, to a small place between Nonancourt and Damville, where it is quiet and where there are simple, real people, among them an old sheepherder from Huesca, a Spaniard displaced here with the Republican fugitives.— Recently, when we were in Damville, they showed the movie Normandie-Njemen. One stays at home.
I will be able to work for myself again, a new volume of poems, Die Niemandsrose [The Noonesrose], will no doubt come out next spring. Each week I'll return to Paris to check the mail — above all for news from the Soviet Union. — And now do let me tell you how much pleasure it gives me to be able to write to you and yours, to be able to wait for an answer — an answer from Moscow.
From the depth of my heart, all the best!
Your Paul
LETTER # 4
TO ERICH EINHORN
Moisville by Nonancourt (Eure), 10 August 1962
Dear Erich,
I hope that my books have reached you meanwhile — I sent you everything you had asked for — except for the translation of Alexander Blok's Twelve of which I don't have a copy anymore (but you did say that it was available in the Moscow libraries — which pleases me a lot).
Some of what I sent you, my Darmstadt speech for example, will most likely not correspond to your taste and ideas, I have only sent them along because, with all its unanswered questions, it documents how lonely man can be in a capitalist society. You are right when you say that in West Germany they have not forgiven me for writing a poem about the German extermination camps — the "Todesfuge." What I have reaped from this — and similar — poems, is a long story. The literature prizes I was given shouldn't fool you: they are, finally, only the alibi of those who, in the shadow of such alibis, continue with other, more contemporary means, what they had started, and continued, under Hitler.
In my latest book of poems (Sprachgitter [Speech-Grille]) you'll find a poem called "Engfiihrung" ["Stretto"] which evokes the devastation caused by the atom bomb. At a central place stands, as fragment, this sentence by Democritus: "There exists nothing except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." I don't need to underline that the poem was written because of that opinion — for the sake of the human, thus against all emptiness and atomizing.
How happy it would make me if you wanted to translate one or the other piece I hardly need to tell you.
How is your mother? and your wife and little Marina? And where do you spend your holidays?
We will be in Normandy until the middle of September. And hope to be able to spend our next summer holidays in the Soviet Union.
The records you sent me are beautiful. Please tell Samuel Marshak that I truly venerate his work.
We greet you warmly!
Paul
I would be very thankful if, as you suggested, you would from time to time draw my attention to books by the new young Soviet poets, — and please also tell me where I went wrong in my translations.
LETTER #5
TO RENE CHAR
Draft of an unsent letter concerning the Gall affair.
78 rue de Longchamp Paris, 22 March 1962
Dear Rene Char,
Thank you for your so true letter. Thank you for shaking my hand —
I shake yours.
What is happening to me, excuse me for speaking of it again, is, believe me, rather unique in its genre. Poetry, as you well know, does not exist without the poet, without its person — without the person —, and, you see, the hoodlums, those of the right as well as those of the "left," have managed to get together in order to annihilate me. I can no longer publish — in that area too, they knew how to isolate me. You — they exile you into the land of the above, but your true country remains for you. Concerning myself, I am redistributed, and then they have fun lapidating me with ... the separate pieces of my self. It won't surprise you if I tell you that the first to have "come up" with that are the pseudo-poets. There are many of those among our common "friends," Rene Char. Many. — Beware of those who ape you, Rene Char. (I know well of what I speak, alas.) In their nullity they consider you a source of images to be added up in order to create a semblance for themselves: they do not reflect you, they darken you.* And they have worked hard at undermining our friendship ... they had a lot of help ...
You see, I have always tried to understand you, to respond to you, to take your work like one takes a hand; and it was, of course, my hand that took yours, there where it was certain not to miss the encounter. To that in your work which did not — or not yet — open up to my comprehension, I responded with respect and by waiting: one can never pretend to comprehend completely —: that would be disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits — or comes to inhabit — the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something one breathes; that poetry breathes you in. (But that breath, that rhythm — where does it come from?) Thought — mute —, and that's again language, organizes that respiration; critical, it clusters in the intervals: it discerns, it doesn't judge; it takes a decision; it chooses: it keeps its sympathy — and obeys sympathy.
; But permit me to backtrack: you tell me that you were able to create the emptiness into which your enemies fall and kill themselves — I rejoice at seeing you so strong, so fortified. As far as my own emptiness is concerned, as far as the emptiness they have been able to create around me is concerned, I see it... as the generator of a whole race of creatures that I couldn't name. And these creatures, I see them as very prolific: they multiply and keep on multiplying; for the Lie knows how to perpetuate itself— thanks to the "nymphettes" or, if not, by scissiparity.
*To which these last few months has been added a true "psychological action" that aims at my psychic destruction.
Wandering, Exile of the Human to be True ...
(I know some who'd quote St-John Perse at you and his "bilingual" poet —: there too they believe they can obtain (an affidavit) an argument for their vile duplicity . . . )
Ah, that layer of snow of which you tell me! For a long time I too had it! But I turned it into the tablecloth my wife spread over our — pleasantly round — table in order to host... so many incarnations of mud!
We remember your first visit, Rene Char, your words inscribed in your book. Downtrodden grasses stand up again. The Heart of the Second Olympian is among them, as is its bow.
Paul Celan
LETTER #6
TO JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Draft of an unsent letter to the French philosopher (who had just been the victim of an assassination attempt at his home on rue Bonaparte) concerning the Goll affair. The translation is based on the manuscript and incorporates Celan's variants in brackets.
After 7 January 1962 [?]
Dear Jean-Paul Sartre,
I take the liberty of appealing to you [like so many others] [at a moment] not without ignoring [the] your current preoccupations.
I write — I write poetry, in German. And I am Jewish.
For some years now, and especially since last year, I have been the object of a campaign of defamation the extent and ramifications of which go far beyond what one could call, at first sight, a literary intrigue.* You will no doubt be astonished if I tell you that it is truly a Dreyfuss affair—sui generis, of course, but with all its characteristics. It is a true mirror of Germany, the roads — "new" — which Nazism knows how to take — in patent collusion, in this case, with a certain "left" with national-Bolshevist tendencies, and also — as happens often in such a case — with a considerable number of "Jews" — are clearly visible. (All of this, moreover, reaches way beyond the borders of Germany.)
* and they have put much work into sapping our friendship ... They had much help . . .
I know all too well that it is difficult for you to believe this unknown person writing you. Permit me to come, in person, to plead my case before you, documents in hand, this case (which I beg you to believe is [rather] unique.)
I permit myself to join a small piece of writing to this letter. I would be happy to give you everything I have done.
I appeal to your sense of justice and of truth.
[In 1948, when I arrived in Paris,]
The facts force me to [ask you] [to treat] to use, concerning this letter, the greatest discretion. I also ask you to grant me a personal interview.
[No signature]
LETTER #7
TO GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE
[Paris] Sunday, 21 August [1965] seven in the evening.
My darling,
Not a very good day yesterday, despite your beautiful Thursday letter and the phone call.
Clearly, this publishing house that sends me, without cover letter, letters addressed to me personally, opened— no, that will not do. My question, though "protocolled" (protokplliert) by Dumitriu, concerning those "two major American publishing houses interested in my work" (postcard from New York sent by dear Tutti two or three years ago) —: still unanswered.
They needed, those bastards, a well-known German-language writer who could also launch a "Lyrik" series for them — so, with the help of that oh so literary bastard Hirsch, they set a trap for me — and I fell for it, counseled by my "friends" Ingeborg, Lenz, Schalliick.
Anyway.
This afternoon, the Cinematheque again: October or rather Ten Days That Shook the World (after the John Reed book I gave you a few years back), directed by Eisenstein. The USSR has brought it out of its archives, this movie from before the Stalinist terror, made in 1928, and on the credits, before the pictures, one could read that it was dedicated to the proletariat of "Piter" — the popular name of Petersburg —:
so — I, you know me, I applauded.
— Psst! No reaction!
That's the answer I got, forcing itself on a theater where no one backed up my applause. Yet, there were readers of the Observateur . . . But the Observateur, that's "Leftism," that's the lovers of the Serie Noire, the homosexuals, the Idhec, the hip Marxisms, etcetera, etcetera.
So, all alone, I saw Petersburg, the workers, the sailors of the Aurora. It was very moving, at times reminding one of the Potemkjn, bringing to mind the thoughts and dreams of my childhood, my thoughts of today and of always, poetry -always-true-always-faithful, I saw my placards, many of them, those that, not very long ago I evoked in the poem I sent you — "Vaporband-, banderole-uprising," I saw the October Revolution, its men, its flags, I saw hope always en route, the brother of poetry, I saw . . .
Then, at a certain moment, at the moment when the insurgents occupy the Winter Palace, it began to desert poetry and to become Cinema, motion-picture shots, tendentious and overdone, the intertexts became propaganda — all that was History and its Personages had anyway been, from the very beginning, what was the least convincing, the role of the Left Social-Revolutionaries was completely expunged — , so then the heart loosened, searched for its silences (won, lost, won again), wrapped them around itself and led me outside, alone, as I had come in, running the gauntlet between young cinephile gents and young girls "mit tupierter Frisur," with too much makeup, in pants, sort of leftist sixteenth arrondissement, erratic and flabby. — But there were some, no doubt, who knew, taking, here too, responsibility for the terrible eclipses. Long live the sailors of Kronstadt!
*To Piter's Proletariat.
Long live the Revolution! Long live Love!
Long live Petersburg! Long live Paris!
Long live Poetry!
Paul
LETTER #8
TO ERIC CELAN
[Epinay-sur-Orge,] Sunday 15 December 1968
My dear Eric,
It is a great joy for me to see you succeed so well in your studies — I congratulate you on being on the honor roll. (You see, I had in fact expected as much.)
I find that your handwriting has improved a lot; it begins to be very much your own, and in these days when so many things, and not surprisingly handwriting among them, are becoming depersonalized, it is particularly pleasurable to see a handwriting, yours, gain a firm profile.
I am also happy for your reading. Gorky and Turgenev are naturally human, Gorky before all, the tone in which he narrates is richly authentic, the problems he goes at he truly lives them, everything starts from the lived experience, and that's very important. Turgenev is more intellectual, more reflective, more abstract maybe, but still always close to human beings and their preoccupations. Of course the world has evolved since Gorky's and Turgenev's days; but to know them and study them in depth means to be able to measure and appreciate what changes, what evolves, what remains though under a new form, often different and yet at the same time identical. — I will continue to suggest reading matter to you, but soon you will pick your own and I'm certain that you will know how to orient yourself. Think also of poetry, of that poetry that is always in quest for truth and I will help you discover it.
I wish you very good holidays in Austria, and send you big hugs.
Your Daddy
LETTER # 9
FROM GISELE CELAN-LESTRANGE TO PAUL
[Paris,] I May 1969
My dear Paul,
Earlier you told me: D
on't you too have difficult hours? Oh Paul, if only you knew! I cannot talk much about it and, in order to resist, I also choose to seem like, to do as if... That does not fool me, even if it fools others, and often it is harder afterwards ... But only the walls of my room witness the hours of my greatest distress.
Work is a refuge for me, the one and the other, together with all the illusions that represents, but I can't and won't deny that it is a help. But engraving is now receding, receding; gouache painting too has become impossible for me after that rush. You know how one can't stand oneself when one is not working and the high price one has to pay for the chance (what would be the right word?) for the possibility of working. I have such a hard time putting up with the copper's silences, as if contact could no longer be established, I am lacking that too right now. Moreover, I am once again not reading, again unable to listen to music. The two cantatas you gave me, barely a month ago, I did love them very much. But I have to admit that today they simply bore me. But why tell you all this? I know so well what you are living through and how much more unjust and evil your fate is than mine.
Your phone...
I have just put on the Beethoven concerto again, which does touch me very deeply. Bach and his immense knowledge also has that acceptance, that resignation which at times is difficult for me to bear. Beethoven is wilder, more human, I feel closer to the pain and revolt of his music than to Bach's. To listen to Bach one has to be well. At least for me it is so. What I'm saying must be totally wrong. But these last few months I have often felt it that way.