Correspondence

“Scarcely more breathlessly and desperately can two lovers ever have struggled for words. Little known among German literary historians, the relationship between these two poets amounts to one of the most dramatic and momentous occurrences in German literature.” – FAZ– “Praise for the German edition”

“Correspondence, rendered perfectly in English by Wieland Hoban, traces [Celan and Bachmann’s] letters, telegrams, and book inscriptions to one another, color-coded and augmented by hundreds of footnotes. Like other volumes from Seagull Books, it’s physically gorgeous, with a pleasingly compact trim size. Reading Correspondence feels like an indulgence. It also feels disorienting. The world of the letters and the world of their authors’ real lives are askew in a sometimes jarring way, so that the emotional content of the letters reads almost as fiction.”

“A magnificent, and troubled, meeting of minds that would last a lifetime… . In almost 200 letters, telegrams, postcards, unsent drafts, poems as love-letters, they tussle with the possibilities and limitations of communication through the written word. Silence and personal darkness have their place. The compromises exacted by life on art, the power and powerlessness of language, fear of the written word, and belief in dialogue through poetry are subjects broached… . Taken together, there seems no doubt that, in each other, Bachmann and Celan did have that precious, nigh-impossible fellow being: a companion ‘you … for me … sensually and intellectually … the two cannot separate.’”

Ingeborg Bachmann is the author of Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, and Simultan, among others.

Paul Celan was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Romania; he lived in France and wrote in German. His works are collected in English in Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, among other books.