Ingeborg/Celan Correspondence

I recently received s copy of Seagull Books’ edition of the Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan correspondence. I don’t know much about either, but I’m passing this on since it looks like another great and important book from Seagull Books.

This Space and Shigekuni have more info on this book.

Shigekuni puts it into perspective:

2023. That’s the year until which the legendary correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann was supposed to be blocked not just for publication but even for scholars. In biographies, the relationship of the two most important German post-war poets used to be a mysterious affair. Everybody knew about it, people knew when it started and when it ended, but the details, how and why it broke off, for example, were shrouded in mystery. Everybody waited for 2023, including yours truly. Thus, when the heirs decided to publish the exchange of letters in 2008, it was nothing less than a literary sensation, one of the most exciting publications of the decade, and probably one of the bestselling volumes of letters published in recent German literary history. The book Herzzeit: Ingeborg Bachmann-Paul Celan. Der Briefwechsel. consists of every extant letter between the two, plus all the letters that Bachmann and Celan’s wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange exchanged and the handful of letters between Celan and Bachmann’s lover of four years, Max Frisch. Together, all these letters paint a vivid and devastating picture of two writers, who were both perfect for one another, and utterly wrong.

And here’s This Space on the substance of the letters:

It was not the collection I had expected. There is little discussion of poetry and only brief references to works in progress or responses to published work. Unlike the first volume of Beckett’s letters, there is little to make the reader pause to copy down lines or phrases. To mine for quotations would probably discolour the character of reading the correspondence as it follows the arc of a lifelong friendship. Reading across over twenty years of haphazard communication is to share in what we may call an infinite holding-between between two lovers now separated for ever. It is an uncomfortable sharing, even more so than Kafka’s loving and distressed letters to Felice, though perhaps only because of the proximity in time. For the most part, however, the letters are reticent approaches by two people who maintain long-term relationships with other partners and express no wish to end them, yet who also remember the brief flaring of an affair as if it expressed the essence of something purer, perhaps poetry itself. Much is discussed in the letters in a context that can only be guessed at, so impressions like mine are inevitable and, to their credit, the editors do not attempt to report the background any more than evidence allows.

Links mentioned in this post

Shigekuni on the Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan correspondence

This Space on the Ingeborg Bachmann Paul Celan correspondence

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