‘This cruel, life’

Paul Celan, originally from Czernowitz in Romania (now in Ukraine), was a Holocaust survivor and arguably the greatest postwar German-language poet. He met the French aristocrat, artist and printmaker Gisèle Lestrange in Paris in November 1951, and a year later they were married. Their letters of 1951–70, written in French, were published in a scholarly edition edited by Bertrand Badiou in 2001. Anglophone readers can now access them in Jason Kavett’s excellent translations, although this book is an abridged selection.

A gifted graphic artist, Gisèle sometimes exhibited her works alongside her husband’s poems and included them in his collections. “You calm me so extraordinarily”, she wrote in a letter soon after they had met. Yet eighteen years into their marriage we find her deploring “this so cruel, detestable life”. Gisèle pardoned her husband’s frequent infidelities, believing his freedom was fundamental to his ability to write poetry. She also tolerated a number of serious physical assaults, his attempted suicide with a paper knife and an attack on a neighbour – all functions of a psychosis that led to frequent incarcerations in psychiatric institutions and, eventually, to Celan’s suicide by drowning in the Seine in 1970.

Gisèle is quick to take the blame for failings in their relationship, denigrating herself as “full of pettiness, without generosity, without nobility, without truth” and concluding: “I have disappointed you”. In the same letter, mysteriously, she admits, “I have feared them, your poems, now I love them, they are true and truth and they are you”. Was the wounding behaviour of a poet – in an early letter, she describes Celan as “of the race of the very rare and the very high” – something that had to be grudgingly endured? Ultimately, Gisèle comes to understand that she and their son, Eric, who has witnessed at least one of his father’s assaults, can no longer live with him.

“When I began loving you … it was your truth that received me, I am still in it”, Celan had written to Gisèle in 1958. Nine years later, Gisèle draws on that quality to write one of the most poignant and candid letters of the correspondence: “In grave moments my inability to help you and the fact that my presence itself is so traumatising for you, the wall of incomprehension that rises between us, this total solitude, this failure I experience and that finally leads to such a dramatic situation, drive me to despair, are too much for me.” In his accompanying notes, many of which draw on private conversations with Gisèle or unpublished journals, Badiou references a passage in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline that Celan had underlined several weeks before Gisèle’s letter was written. It includes this line: “O most delicate fiend! / Who is’t can read a woman?”

Letters included here to Eric, born in 1955, reveal a more benevolent, paternal side to the poet and shed light, too, on his poetics. He encourages his son to “think also of poetry, of that which is always in search of truth”. Elsewhere, he accepts that his son might “do something else, and this will still be like writing poems”.

Also collected are many poems that Celan sent to Gisèle, some of them earlier versions of ones that appear in his final canon. In many cases, they contain French translations and vocabulary lists for his wife. In his introduction, Badiou points out that these are “literal, not literary translations”, but that is arguably the most appropriate way to translate Celan. Indeed, in a footnote to one of a number of Celan’s French neologisms found in the correspondence, Badiou points out that he “liked to practice this kind of ‘loan translation,’ which gives an indication of the way he wished to be read and understood: literally”. With his own French translations of his poems, Celan has pointed the way for his readers and translators.

Although the poet always insisted that his work was anti-biographical, his notoriously complex poetry can be better understood when put in the context of his turbulent life (see TLS, April 5, 2024). Both are illuminated by this correspondence, which is deepened by Badiou’s invaluable footnotes. This is a significant publication, not only for scholars of Paul Celan, but for anyone interested in poetry: what it means, how it works and the creative processes that underpin it.

Mark Glanville’s memoir, The Goldberg Variations, was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize for Jewish literature in 2004. His forthcoming book is Come and Dance in Puglia

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