For the memory of Pierre Joris, whose love for Paul Celan is an eternity in language. 

 

1

In our great solitude, it feels good all the same to be able to exchange a few words from time to time, even when they are not essential words.

— Paul to Gisele, August 6, 1965

In literature, as in life, lovers wait for letters to arrive. This mixture of anxiety and anticipation shapes their relationship to time. Through syllables, verbs, pledges, and diminutives, lovers offer themselves to the Other in language, leaning on the epistolary form’s capacity to transcend the temporospatial boundaries that circumscribe our existence. The language of letters formulates intersubjective intimacies. 

The letter is that which travels. 

I mailed a postcard from Birmingham to Krakow in the hope that my words would go back to meet their addressee. The words on the postcard had been written a decade ago, but they belonged to a place in Poland, to a body inhabiting that studio apartment near the plaza, to a time that returns as memory. Even now, as I type, his face reappears in my mind: the wry grin situated above an unshaven chin, the bounce of his knee when listening to music. There is no chance that he will receive the postcard. In sending it, I have elected to publish a story about the past in a limited venue. Perhaps the postcard’s recipient will recognize his name. . .  More likely, the recipient will be introduced to the addressee for the first time by the postcard. Although I was speaking to him when the postcard was written, I am speaking to someone else when I drop it inside the blue post office box at Piggly Wiggly. My addressee is elsewhere. He has become a character. But the existence of this character doesn’t negate the time that existed. The time that was mine and his lingers, despite its official end. The tempo has changed but our time continues, inscrutable.

 

2

Opened the Yeats volume to page 62: “The Lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart”

— Paul to Gisele, January 18, 1965

“The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite,” Paul Celan said in his “Meridian Speech,” marking his acceptance of the 1960 Georg Büchner Prize. The poem “goes toward” the Other and “bespeaks it . . . everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.” The letter or the poem may not reach the addressee, yet the threat of the letter’s nonarrival indicates its journey has begun. 

Whenever the writer risks being read, she also courts the possibility of being unread or misread. This is part of the writing life. Fearing that the words will not arrive or reach their reader, the writer reminds herself that these conditions make arrival possible. Jacques Derrida said something to this effect, on a postcard dressed as a book, in a section titled “Envois” composed of love letters the speaker declined to send for fear they would disappear in the mail. By publishing them publicly, the writer avoids the possibility of that loss. But does he compromise their existence as letters to a particular someone? Are they still “letters” in that sense? 

The text in question, Derrida’s The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, positioned itself as a satire of epistolary literature. Where satire mocks earnestness, the “open letter,” an epistolary form addressed to a broader public, relies upon sincerity, or the belief that we can mean what we say. In refusing a public silence, open letters address the shared space of the human community. Its signatories speak to the governing system as well as the sky. It stands, often, alone with its own shadows, incurring the peril of misinterpretation.

I thought about epistolary forms in literature while reading Letters to Gisèle: 1951-1970, the recently published collection of letters exchanged between Paul Celan and both his wife, the French visual artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and their son, Eric¹Paul Celan, Letters to Gisèle: 1951-1970. New York: NYRB Classics, 2024. Translated by Jason Kavett, with notes by Bertrand Badiou. I noticed that Paul frequently mailed poems as part of his correspondence. This pairing of poems and letters allows one to read them in combination for lexical patterns and references. The same is true for marvelous footnotes that bury small things of significance in the text’s margins. Over the course of a few months, I filled an entire notebook with patterns and connections between Paul’s poems, letters, historical events, timelines, ekphrastic possibilities, neologisms … only to encounter a daunting meridian²Derrida buried two fetuses and a love affair in his one-way text. One of those fetuses outlived its co-author to become Daniel, the secret son that provided Derrida’s lover with an event worthy of leaving him. Paradoxically, this son enabled his mother, S. to reclaim an autonomous self, grounded in the decision about the role love would play in her own life. One could do worse. One could construct our doings as an “inheritance.”.

 

3

Here, in all its nudity, a poem to pass the time—no, here is a true poem—der Ungebändigte is the person who cannot be dominated … —to attach ourselves to that a little and to hear ourselves live.

— Paul to Gisele, March 29th, 1966

Letters opens with an epistle from Gisele to Paul dated December 11th, 1951. The two had known each other for less than a month, but love took off furiously, pounding through the months and days of 1952 with gusto, turning the calendar year into a map of symbols and traces. The key to this map constructs the world of their love story. The key defines love’s terrain. The addresses move across Europe as Paul seeks publishers to secure the stable income that will allow Gisele to marry him. He jokes about this in a letter dated January 28,1952, adding: “What I loved until now, I loved to be able to love you.” On May 21st, en route from Hamburg to the Group 57 conference in Neindorf, Paul tells Gisele: “While I was eating cherries on the train, I still had, on my lips, the taste of Yours.” On June 2nd, from Frankfurt, Paul gets metaphysical: “I have only You in this world (and in all the others) – yes.” The two are married on December 23rd. They honeymoon in Avignon, a site that will be sanctified by references to its symbols and souvenirs in their later letters. 

 

4

Deathfugue is also this for me: a tombstone epigraph and a tombstone [……]
My mother too has only this grave.

— Paul to Ingeborg Bachmann, Nov. 12, 1959

Poetry makes time a site whose silences (the unsaids) exist in relation to its sounds (the sayings). Where public discourse bounds and shapes these silences by designating what is unspeakable, Paul’s figuration of “breathturns” resisted this by revealing language’s silences, stammers, and ellipses. The breathturn is the poem’s breath. And no one underscored this aspect as tenderly as Pierre Joris, whose translations of Paul Celan brought these breathturns into language. 

Notably, “breathturn” appeared in Celan’s notes for his “Meridian Speech,” which he designated as “a speech against artistry and for the human.” Refusing the divide between external and internal reality, the word breathturn “writes itself here-ward from its existential mother-ground.” Two fragments later, Celan finds himself “tinkering with Mandelstam, again,” tracking how words “touch & cut across each other in the poetry.”³Drawing on Pierre Joris’ translations of Celan’s critical fragments, as published in Microliths, see microliths 215 and 217 for quotations.

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange remains a mystery. Perhaps love’s condition is that such mysteries be honored. This is the paradox of studying a writer’s correspondence, or attempting to define the figure known as “the author.” You could be anyone. The terms of address are entangled by the feel of immediacy: we read ourselves in the story. This illusion of proximity is part of what makes the epistolary so dangerous. 

In Paul’s early letters, Gisele is “You”— the direct addressee. Only later does Paul drop the majuscule, rendering her as an ordinary “you.” The nature of the address shifts the terms of engagement, reflecting changes in the relationship, and what the two permit themselves to expect.

Correspondence corresponds with other signifying events, leading the critic (like the reader) to believe they know more than they can. This epistemic overconfidence calls to mind a book written by Hugo von Hofmammstahl in 1902, later titled Ein Brief (“A Letter”), and structured as a fictional letter from a writer named Lord Philip Chandos to Francis Bacon. Experiencing a crisis of language, Lord Chandos despairs of his ability to represent reality and render meaning. Francis Bacon was real, but Lord Chandos was invented to address the future. 

Ein Brief wasn’t published until 1966, but it generated a flurry of scholarly writing around the “Chandos crisis,” a term that ties Hofmannstahl’s abandonment of lyric poetry in 1900 to Lord Chandos’s plight. Scholars read the book as a memorial to the moment in time when Hofmannstahl turned towards a more socially engaged (and financially profitable) literary form, namely, theater. One might say the author found an imaginary letter mailed from the past into the future, and this form served his needs more effectively than an open letter, a personal statement, or an essay. The readers’ access to a private letter here determines the nature of speech.

 

5

But are we all not descended from such dates? And to which dates do we attribute ourselves?
But the poem does speak!

 — Paul Celan, “The Meridian Speech” (translated by Jerry Glenn)

For Paul, poetic time is marked by its date and shaped by the encounter it anticipates. Time and again, Paul looks for patterns in numbers and texts, and shares his divinations with Gisele. He amplifies birthdays and anniversaries, delights in noting coinciding events, and derives significance from those numerical coincidences. The number twenty-three, for example, defines his existence: his birth date matched the date of his marriage to Gisele. Every twenty-three held traces of his life mingling with hers. This habit of making calendars to memorialize sacred dates preceded Gisele’s presence in Paul’s life.

There is July 14th, for example, the date in 1938 when Paul arrived in Paris on a train from Vienna, fleeing the fascist regime in Romania. He returned to this date twelve years later, in a poem written on July 14th of 1950. He titled the poem as “Twelve Years.” Hitler’s Nazi regime lasted twelve years. The poem knows the name and the date. The poem re-members.⁴This is the neologism Paul coins for the poem. The poem rises from the uncanny and often painful coincidences. 

“Every poem has its 20th of January inscribed,” Paul observed, drawing a line between this utterance in a room where German-speaking literati had gathered to see the Büchner Prize awarded, and the day when Büchner’s character, Lenz, traveled through the mountains and lost his mind. Lenz begins: “On the 20th of January Lenz walked through the mountains”; January 20th also marks the day in 1942 when the Wannsee Conference committed Europe to Hitler’s Final Solution, namely, the deportation and murder of European Jews in all German-occupied territories. January 20th returns to mark “Tübingen, January,” a poem written during Paul’s visit to the “towerroom” where Friedrich Hölderlin lived out his days, condemned to stammering, losing his connection to language. Paul addressed the poem to the “solitude and pain that Hölderlin felt in the end, when he had succumbed to the excess of eloquence and been submerged, reduced to silence, by sacred pathos,” in Pierre Joris’s words.   

In 1958, Paul was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize. His speech emphasized the power of language to meet us in our grief and loss: “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” In the same year, German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad used “apophenia” to refer to a habit of perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things. This continuous perception of connections accompanied by “a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness” indicated, to Conrad, the early stages of schizophrenia.  

Writing to Gisele from Stockholm, Paul mentioned his friend, Nelly Sachs, who had fled to the city with her mother after witnessing the Gestapo murder her lover. Paul and Nelly’s friendship grew from their coinciding losses: both were their parents’ only children; both grieved having been orphaned; both felt displaced by time and geography. Lacking a sense of the safety and continuance associated with homelands, they spoke in poetry, calling each other “brother” and “sister” in their letters and poems. 

In a 1958 letter addressed to Nelly, Paul alluded to “all the unanswerable questions in these dark days,” calling into being the figure of Heinrich Heine, whom both poets adored, and whose poem, “To Edom,” contains the phrase: “Only sometimes, in dark times.” Decades prior, Heine had included this poem in a letter to Moses Moser,  brothers fated to share in each other’s experience of pain and fury. The poem served as a missive against loneliness and erasure. The poem insisted that both poets—and their relationship— existed, despite the world’s inanity. Paul also used Heine’s “Only sometimes, in dark times” as epigraph for the invective “Agonif and Gangster—Ditty Sung in Paris Empres Pontoise,” directed against writers who supported Claire Goll’s accusation that he had plagiarized the work of her dead husband, Ivan Goll.

In the year prior, Paul had been obsessed with Osip Mandelstam, a Russian poet he had never met, discovering in the process of translation a sort of kinship, an ongoing conversation that would shape his poetics. 

 

6

Both apply:

Touched and Untouched.

Both things speak of love with guilt,

both things want to exist and to die.

— Paul to Ingeborg, October 27, 1957

In 1922, on commission by the Ukrainian premier’s sister, Osip Mandelstam published “On the Nature of the Word,” a prose pamphlet articulating the poet’s responsibility to his homeland. Citing Bruyosov, Mandelstam rebuffed nihilist trends in Russian poetics and argued for poetry’s “moral force.” The poetic school of Acemism that Mandelstam described scorned all borders, fences, private property, and exclusive notions of national heritage. “Everything is accessible,” Mandelstam wrote, from ruins to ancient languages and labyrinths. Nothing was finished or untouchable. The scope of the poet had no measure; all of existence wanted to be palpated, encountered, spoken, transliterated. The word was bread. The world had no borders. Everyone needs bread. Everyone eats it without acknowledging it. Only an animal as demented as the human would be ashamed of eating, laughing, sharing, celebrating, and being alive in a bread-needing body. 

“Until now the social inspiration of Russian poetry has reached no further than the idea of ‘citizen,’ but there is a loftier principle than ‘citizen,’ there is the concept of ‘Man’,” Mandelstam wrote, likening poetry to an “Egyptian funerary ship” in which “everything is provided for life, nothing is forgotten.” 

Mandelstam’s Egyptian ghost ship moves through the republic of letters, and returns in Paul’s 1957 correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann. Their affair had ended in spring 1948, recurred again when Ingeborg visited Paris in 1950, and then ended entirely when Paul met Gisele. Now, amid many silences, the affair resumed. We know this from letters, and gaps.

Only three letters between Paul and Gisele are published in Letters for the year 1957. The first is sent from Cologne on February 5th. “I will surely not be very long,” he assures Gisele, closing with kisses for her and love for Eric. The next one, sent from Paris on August 9th, closes with Paul’s statement: “I kiss You, my love. Kiss our ever so naughty son.” There is no mention of an affair, no reference to marital strife. “My darling little Peach, I am—am—so happy beside You in our new abode,” Paul wrote from Paris on November 21st. But Gisele knew Paul more intimately than anyone. And mercy is part of love, just as judgment is part of contempt.

On October 27, 1957, Ingeborg thanked Paul for telling Gisele “everything,” since “‘sparing’ her would mean becoming even guiltier, and also belittling her.” She asks him not to leave his wife or son. (There is no indication that he planned to do this.) Ecstatic at being permitted to speak his name again, Ingeborg asks to be liberated, however briefly, from the silence of withholding his place in her heart. 

Paul responds on October 31st, confirming his own joy at “being allowed to speak and write down your name,” and calling her back into his poems. Whenever he reads “In Egypt,” he sees her step into it. “You are the reason for living, not least because you are, and will remain, the justification for my speaking,” Paul tells Ingeborg. Again, one is struck by how politics, poetics, and friendship meet in confluence. They refer to one another as “foundlings”: he, orphaned by the Shoah; she, orphaned by her own decision to disavow a relationship with her father due to his fascism and sexual abuse. 

 

7

What did I do?

— Paul to Ingeborg, Nov. 2, 1957

“What did I do?” This is the first line of a poem titled “All Soul’s Day,” which Paul enclosed in a letter to Ingeborg dated November 2nd. The poem’s second stanza speaks to betrayal and opens with the image of orphaned rocks: “Foundling rocks, stars, black and full of language, named / after a broken oath.”

In his 1913 essay “On the Addressee,” Mandelstam compared poetry to a message in a bottle. “I find [the bottle] in the sand, read the letter, learn about the date of the event and the last will of the one who perished,” he said. What is the reader’s relationship to the message in the bottle? Mandelstam continued: “The letter sealed in the bottle is addressed to the one who finds it. I found it. Therefore I am the secret addressee.”

Paul’s writing is suffused with the spirit of Mandelstam: his Bremen speech drew on Mandlestam’s bottle. “I know scarcely any other Russian poet of his generation who was in time, thought with and out of this time, thought it through to its end, in each of its moments, in its issues and happenings, in the words that faced tissues and happenings and were to stand for them, at once open and hermetic,” Paul wrote to Mandelstam’s publisher, Gleb Struve.⁵In his Bremen speech, Paul defined poetry as “that which can signify a breathturn.” Paul brings this breathturn into the poem, “Psalm”, written shortly thereafter. “Psalm” is an anti-psalm, or a benediction, a doxology, a prayer written over an abyss. 

 

11

I love you, Paul, and I also say your name very loudly and you will say mine too, won’t you?”

— Gisele to Paul, Jan. 23, 1958

Gisele knew that Paul’s relationship with Ingeborg had begun again, and that it would continue as he traveled, before ending in June 1958. 

But January 23rd was a talismanic date for the Celans: their anniversary. On that January 23rd, Paul encloses a few pieces of bark from the plane tree, a reference to their honeymoon in Avignon, and a short note including a protective blessing: “May these pieces of bark protect You, they in which You have always trusted, and which have deserved Your trust,” he writes. “I will think of You ceaselessly. Believe in my Love, please!” 

Gisele’s anniversary letter to Paul is lengthy and repentant. She derides her own “egotistical love” and regales his “goodness.” There are unarticulated secrets, as when she mentions feeling cold since he has discovered what she is. “Oh my darling, Do you really forgive me for what I am and that you didn’t know I was? I have disappointed you. I will make no promises, I will try to keep those I would like to make ….” And then, on the next page: “I know only how to love you badly, but my life is to love you, that’s my only life, I have no other.” Gisele seems to be pleading while also struggling to reassure him:

“My freedom is you, all the rest is chains, I have no use for chains, I like freedom, I like my freedom, my great, tender, and terrible freedom. Do you really know how much I am yours? Do you know that I belong entirely to you?”

Paul responds two days later, from Bremen, where he prepares to receive his prize. There is an “azalea at the window, tulips on the table,” a “welcoming” ambiance. He mentions working on his speech and adds: “Wait for me calmly, there cannot be any shocks.” 

These three epistles are all that exists of their correspondence in the year of 1958, as published in Letters. It would be presumptuous to assume we can “know” what transpired. The love between Gisele and Paul persisted. 

 

12

We are still what we are.

— Paul to Gisele, in her copy of Die Niemandsrose, October 24, 1963

Die Niemandsrose (“No One’s Rose”) was Paul’s tribute to his encounter with the “funerary ship.” The book is dedicated to Osip, “my brother.” The poems move through Osip’s oceans, his islands, his Dante; it is a work of staggering beauty:

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.

Praised be your name, no one.

In the lines quoted above, Michael Hamburger’s translation follows the literal grain of this elliptical poem driven by negative theophany. It bears noting that Pierre Joris translated those same lines differently:  

NoOne kneads us again of earth and clay,
noOne conjures our dust.
Noone. 

Praised be thou, NoOne.

Joris binds the negations to their objects, thus creating new word-objects like “NoOne” and “noOne,” forcing the tension into the words themselves by complicating the way the pronouns see one another. One could say that Joris solders the words together across the abyss created in the act of their speaking. 

The inside jacket of Gisele’s copy of Niemandsrose contains the following inscription: “For You, my Love / On the Bridge of Years / Paul, Paris, 24 October 1963.” But there is another inscription, a brief line that Paul added beneath the title of a particular poem beginning   “Das Wort vom Zur-Tiefe-Gehen … .” This is where Paul hid their secret phrase: “We are still what we are.” One might even venture to imagine this line as creating a new poem, a sort of ghost-poem that inscribes itself within that temporal space, and the years between the poet’s creation of the original poem and his offering it to his wife. The first stanzas of the ghost-poem might then read:

We are what we are. 

The word about going-into-the-depth, 
that we have read.
The years, the words since then.
It is still and always us.

 

13

We still are what we are, we are still in what we are. 

— Paul to Gisele, May 8, 1965

A letter to Jean Starobinski dated May 3rd shows how far Paul’s paranoia has progressed. The conspiracy against him now includes his physician. The “very tired” Gisele has been urging him to “go to a clinic,” but Paul doesn’t trust the clinic his doctor has recommended. “Could you, very rapidly, help us, by recommending to me a Jewish doctor … Do it, by telegram if possible. You can save all three of our lives, who will remain eternally grateful to you.” The words ramble on in desperation: “Act, please help us […] I am very troubled—they have done so much to trouble me! But I am not entirely lacking in lucidity. / Help my son, help my wife, help me.” The letter went unmailed. 

A few days later, Paul writes to his son Eric, explaining he is not well, and his illness means that Eric will stay with an aunt until Gisele comes to get him. “You will grow, you will wait with Mama for me to come back to live with you, work with you and for you,” Paul insists. “Nothing, you know it well, can separate us.” 

On May 6th, Paul dedicated the second edition of Die Niemandsrose to Gisele with a note. The world unfrays within it. He begins with his usual “For you, my Beloved,” before sliding into an incoherent series of affirmations that close in his trusted frame. The name. The date. The solid refrain. “On the Bridge of Years, in Paris, May sixth 1965.” 

The following day Paul experienced his “Beziehungswahn” (“madness of relation”). He mentioned it in his notes around the same time he wrote that Franz Kafka and Lichtenberg also read everything as a sign. He spent 1965 in and out of treatment, reading, writing, and corresponding. In an August letter to Gisele, he says he recently finished reading Novalis. A footnote in Letters informs the reader that Paul’s copy of Heinrich von Ofterdingen used a pen to mark the following passage: “Heinrich becomes stones in his madness—tree that sounds like ‘Flower’—golden ram–Heinrich guesses the meaning of the word. His voluntary madness. It is the mystery that is posed to him.” One can hear traces of the poem that would become “Flimmertree” in it. 

Paul’s October 15th note to Gisele is sparse and unsigned—“You know, we are still what we are,” whispers the no-name.

 

14

Now and then he experienced a sense of uneasiness because he was not able to walk on his head.

— Paul, quoting Georg Buchner’s Lenz in “The Meridian Speech”

There is no single moment when the world dissipates and becomes unreal. Instead, there are constellations, a series of flashes, the feeling of disconnected facts linking together, the burnt scent of overworked circuits, the excruciating loneliness. 

While visiting Paul in 1966, Petre Solomon grieved his increasingly conspiratorial thinking. The gregarious, charming Paul he’d known in Bucharest Surrealist circles had come to resemble the late stammering of Friedrich Holderlin, whose nervous disorder, “cyclothymia,” drew him between despair and rage, keeping him bound to his pain. At one point, Paul will attack strangers on the street and accuse them of being involved in a conspiracy to slander his name.⁶In his memoirs, Petre grieves what he perceives to be a deep, unassailable loneliness resulting from Paul’s being uprooted from the land of his youth. The formerly-sociable, charming Paul has become a friendless, loner in Paris. I would add: to choose your mother’s language and then live in its constant rejection, writing for presses that exist over national borders, is to find yourself always foreign in whatever you speak or say or dream. Mortified by the meaningless trends and literary careerists, Paul buckled down into seriousness, refusing to reconsider his worldviews. Petre couldn’t understand why Paul maintained his distance from experimental circles in Paris, Given the number of Romanian-Jewish poets who lived in Paris, including Surrealists, Lettrists, Situationists, Conceptualists, Neo-classicists, Absurdists, Petre could not understand why Paul kept his distance from experimental circles in Paris, and denied himself so many possibilities for friendship. 

Paul’s relational view of language acknowledges how poems and letters touch us; how words become ways of being-with others across borders and time and unfathomable difference.  Losing access to this way of being, whether by aphasia, depression, betrayal, medication, forecloses existence. If the loneliness of Holderlin’s locked tower hounded Paul, his letters evince a growing distance from others. The distance appears as an absence, a horrible hush upon realizing that Paul and Gisele’s secret utterance—“We are still what we are”—vanishes from their published correspondence after November 1965. 

To lose language is to lose the basis of relations for Paul. Language betrays us, as we betray each other. But once mental illness is diagnosed in the poet, we read the poems as “ill,” as inflected by the chance-breath of that illness, a diagnosis that often aligns with our judgment of wrongness. It is easier to discount the worries of someone who has been overwritten by an anxiety disorder, as if the “disorder” itself becomes a particular reading filter. Reborn beneath the flag of tragedy, the “mad” poet is flagged as unstable, unreliable in the communication of eternal truths. We read Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven. We kill her again, so to speak. This, too, is a way of holding a human’s death against them, however quietly. This, too, becomes a method of burying the means by which their words can be used to make sense of the world. 

 

15

That is, I believe, if not the inherent obscurity of poetry, the obscurity attributed to it for the sake of the encounter, in the name of and for the love or encounter which itself befalls “from a great distance or a sense of strangeness.”

— Jacques Derrida quoting Paul in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan

Paradoxically, erasure is what stimulates an ethic of remembrance. By revoking memory, draconian political regimes and dictatorships turned memory (and memorialization) into an ethical imperative: to remember as counterpoint to programmatic erasure. The discipline of “Memory Studies” emerged to reflect this view of remembrance as an act of resistance. In the US, Paul Celan is often read as part of this memorial “poetics of witness.”  

As a “message en route,” the poem moves across time, gathering traces from other languages and landscapes. Paul’s intertextual references and allusions endow the poem with this sort of undeclared hybridity. In the land he shares with Mandelstam, poems are a language we use in the hopes of discovering our interlocutors, or humans to whom our silences would be legible. Friends coexist within each other’s silences and suffering. Poems create conditions for encounters across time and space, in the air where my loneliness meets your loneliness and recognizes its own face. 

Obsessions with remembrance and preservation can lead to compulsive behaviors, like hoarding. My notebooks on Paul testify to this: names, words, dates, minutiae are stacked across pages, inventoried by page number. I tell myself that this close reading is an effort to understand the poet, and to honor his conception of the encounter. Nothing is extraneous in a Celan poem, I whisper. Nothing. And besides, superstitiousness is endemic in Bukovina, as cultivated by the babas on benches in villages and large towns. Superstition is part of storytelling as Walter Benjamin understood it. 

But what I discount as mere superstition is difficult to pry apart from the frantic over-signification of the ordinary that defines paranoia. The writer’s obsession with preserving a record of Paul’s traces lands her in the same over-interpretivism that characterizes paranoid thinking. (I worry about betraying Paul and Gisele as I write this.)

 

16

My very dear Gisèle, 

This moment which I can, perhaps, situate. You know my purpose, that of my existence; you know my raison d’être.

— Paul to Gisele, January 14, 1970

Paranoia turns laughter, community, human failure, and everyday absurdity into an all-encompassing threat. Dread and despair make death seem like the only way out. Although Paul didn’t profess to believe in a god, part of him remained bound to the teleology of judgement, the legacy of beliefs created by religions that promote a conclusion of time in a final moment of judgement. In sanctifying judgement, monotheistic religions have consecrated an apocrypha of destruction whose vengeance has blazed through the world for more than two thousand years. It is never enough for those jealous gods. No sacrifice is enough to sate them or the men who deploy Carl Schmitt’s political theology. 

Paul’s final letters seem haunted by an economy of sacrifice and punishment. 

The appendix of Letters to Gisele includes a photo of Paul’s handwritten letter to Gisèle, dated January 14, 1970. The small, angular lettering crosses the blank page in perfectly straight lines. Judging by the handwriting, its author is sober, upright, brief, and to the point. But the words, themselves, are devastating. He tells her that the “kilodrama” has happened: “Faced with the choice between my poems and our son, I have chosen: our son.” In one of his moments of delusion, Paul had suggested that poetry required him to make “Abraham’s sacrifice again.” This sacrificial idea clung to his mind, and he references it in this letter, telling Gisele that Eric “is entrusted” to her and asking her to “help him.” In October of the prior year, during an extended visit to Israel, Paul mailed a postcard of Jerusalem to Eric. This would be the final postcard he sent to his son. 

As for this letter to Gisele, Paul ends it clearly, unambiguously. “I have loved no woman as I have loved you, as I love you. It is love— an over-contested thing—that dictates these lines to me.”

 

17

And to which dates do we attribute ourselves? But the poem [. . .]

 — Paul Celan, “The Meridian Speech” (translated by Jerry Glenn)

It is believed that Paul jumped into the Seine from Pont Mirabeau, close to his apartment, on April 19 or 20th of 1970. On his desk, he left another conversation with the dead: Wilhelm Michael’s biography of Holderlin, open to page 464, with the following sentence from a letter by Clemens Brentano underlined: Sometimes this genius goes dark and drowns in the bitter well of his heart. 

On May 12th, Paul was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. On the same day, Nelly died of cancer in Stockholm. In 1991, Gisele Lestrange-Celan joined Paul and their other son, Francois (who died a few days after his birth), in Pere Lachaise. Gisèle’s decision to preserve these letters, knowing they would likely be published one day, was an act of love. As was Eric’s decision to make them public, in Jason Kavett’s translation, alongside the meticulous footnotes by Bertrand Badiou. All these acts were born from love for a poet whose humanity brings us to encounter our own.  

In a poem dated June 14, 1967, the speaker follows “the rivers into the / homeland of / melting ice, / toward it,” creating a sense of movement that renders the speaker indistinguishable from the poem, posing a question that remains unanswered and unanswerable as it wonders “whose sign?” will be etched upon the stone, the word in the water, the message, the poet, himself.

 

Among my readings: 

Paul Celan, Letters to Gisèle: 1951-1970. New York: NYRB Classics, 2024. Translated by Jason Kavett, with notes by Bertrand Badiou. 

Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones. Contra Mundum Press, 2020. Translated by Pierre Joris, edited by Babara Wiedemann and Bertrand Badiou. Cover art by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.

Paul Celan. From Memory Rose into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020. Translated by Pierre Joris. 

And, given the importance that Celan’s writings play for many readers and poets, I would like to acknowledge the limitations of my own readings, which are haunted by the temptation to be exhaustive at the cost of being coherent, therefore admitting what Paul Zweig wrote in his preface to The Heresy of Self-Love, namely: “By following my sympathies, I have perhaps given a certain unity to the arbitrary, which may be the best one can do with his ignorance.”