PAUL CELAN was born in Romania in 1920. In 1942, his parents were deported and died in an extermination camp. Celan escaped. In 1948 he settled in Paris, which was his home until his suicide by drowning in 1970.
Ilana Shmueli, originally a childhood friend of Paul Celan's in Romanian Czernowitz, was to become the last great love of the poet's maturity. 'Das was geschah' (that which happened) as he referred to the Holocaust, resulted in his exile to Paris, hers to Tel Aviv. Though their first post-war meeting took place in Israel in 1965, the relationship was not ignited until Celan's trip to Jerusalem in 1969. . . . The correspondence concludes with Celan's final letter, written on April 12, 1970: 'Your word, that truthfulness is longing, moved me utterly.' Days later, after failing to reach him, Shmueli returned to Paris and discovered that he had committed suicide by throwing himself in the Seine. . . .The writer Norman Manea, in an interview with Shmueli included here, questions whether the Holocaust was not so much the motor for Celan's creativity as the chance vehicle for 'his all-important subject, suffering.' Celan's mental deterioration is revealed in letters that become increasingly brief and impatient, and poems which, Shmueli claims, 'sound bitter, dark, they attack.' Celan complains frequently of memory loss, probably the result of the medical treatment he was receiving to cure a mental illness that Shmueli prefers to see as 'distress brought on by reality . . . an uncompromising search for truth.' The translator Susan H. Gillespie rises well to the task of capturing the 'half-speech' of Shmueli's unrestrained flow and Celan's always considered, often struggled-for language.--The Times Literary Supplement
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