Insightful and provocative letters by a great twentieth-century poet to his artist wife about life and, revealingly, his own writing. An intimate look at this canonical poet's process, mental health, and quotidian moments during the early 1950s.One of the most significant European poets of the twentieth century, Paul Celan came from an Eastern European Jewish family and lost his parents to the death camps of World War II. Transplanted to Paris, he produced a body o...

The essential prose works of the great Paul Celan, beautifully translated by Rosmarie Waldrop“I am supposed to tell you some of the words I heard deep down in the sea where there is much silence and so much happens.” So begins the first text in this indispensable volume, which includes: “Edgar Jené and the Dream about the Dream,” “Backlight,” “The Meridian,” and the piece which Celan himself deemed his most important, “Conversation in the Mountains.” George Steiner...

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in...

"Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful and passionate correspon...