Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan: Herzzeit/Heart’s Time, A Correspondence
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Bucovina, Romania. He became one of the most prominent 20th century poets. Celan committed suicide in Paris, in 1970, before turning 50. Ingeborg Bachmann was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She wrote poems, libretti, novels and is considered one of the most talented German – Austrian writers of the 20th century. Bachmann died in rather strange circumstances in a fire in Rome, in 1973. She was 47 years old. The love affair between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan constitutes one of the most dramatic chapters of literary history after 1945. The respective backgrounds of the lovers who came together in May 1948 in occupied Vienna could not have been more different: she, the philosophy student daughter of an early Austrian member of the NSDAP; he, a stateless German-speaking Jew from Czernowitz who had lost his parents in a concentration camp and was himself a survivor of a Romanian labour camp. It is from this irreconcilable difference that Paul Celan developed his role as a Jewish poet writing for German readers and his high standards for poetry in German after the Jewish catastrophe. For Ingeborg Bachmann, who had already confronted the most recent past of Germany and Austria, it became a new impulse – to spend her life fighting the danger to forget, and to champion Celan’s work. Both this difference and the striving to resume the dialogue – precisely because of that difference – characterize their letters, from the first gift of a poem in May/June 1948 to the last letter of 1967. Writing formed the focal point in the lives of both correspondents… For both, however, writing – including letter-writing – was no easy matter. The struggle for language and the conflict with the word assume a central role in the correspondence. Time and again, there are references to unsent letters: some of these were failures and hence discarded; some were kept, and appear between the others as documents of doubt… the phrase ‘You know’ [Du weisst or Du weisst ja] often stands in for a direct statement, and telegrams or short letters often promise longer letters, which do not always come… Silence, in some cases a source of torment for one of the two parties and in others maintained by a tacit agreement, is an important element throughout the six phases of their correspondence… Between the weeks spent together in Vienna and the last of the 196 documents – letters, postcards, telegrams, dedications and a page of conversation notes – these events are: Celan’s departure from Vienna to travel to Paris in June 1948; the meeting at the conference of Gruppe 47 in Niendorf (their last for several years); the resumption of the love affair after a conference in Wuppertal in October 1957; Bachmann’s encounter with Max Frisch in the summer of 1958; and, finally, the intensification of Celan’s mental crisis in late 1961 following the climax of the Goll affair, instigated by Yvan Goll’s widow with accusations of plagiarism. The first phase, the time of their encounter in Vienna, has a central document, Celan’s dedicatory poem, ‘In Agypten’. ‘Splendidly enough,’ writes Ingeborg Bachmann to her parents on 20th May 1948, ‘the surrealist poet Paul Celan’ has fallen in love with her. 3 days later Celan sends her this poem with a dedication (‘Vienna, 23 May 1948. To the meticulous one, 22 years after her birthday, From the unmeticulous one’) in a book of Matisse paintings. ———————————————————- ‘In Egypt’ For Ingeborg You should say to the eye of the strange woman: Be the water. You should find in the stranger’s eye those you know are in the water. You should bring them from the water: Ruth! Naomi! Miriam! You should adorn them when you lie with the stranger. You should adorn them with the cloudy hair of strangers. You should say to Ruth and Miriam and Naomi: Look, I’m sleeping with you! You should adorn the strange woman nearest you most beautifully. You should adorn her with sorrow for Ruth, for Miriam and Naomi. You should say to the stranger: Look, I slept with them! [translated by Stephen Lloyd Webber. http://stephenlloydwebber.com/2011/03/ten-translations-of-paul-celan-poems/] Letter from Bachmann to Celan, Vienna, Christmas 1948. NOT SENT. Dear, dear Paul! Yesterday and today I thought a great deal about you – or about us, if you will. I am not writing to you because I want you to write again, but because it gives me pleasure and because I want to. I had also planned to meet you somewhere in Paris very soon, but then my stupid and vain sense of duty kept me here and I did not leave. What does this mean anyway – ‘somewhere in Paris’? I don’t know anything, but I do think it would have been lovely somehow! Three months ago someone suddenly gave me your book of poems as a gift. I didn’t know it had come out. That was so… the ground was so light and buoyant beneath me, and my hand was trembling a little, just a very little bit. […] I still do not know what last spring meant. – You know me, I always want to know everything very precisely. – It was lovely – and so were the poems, and the poem we made together. Today you are dear to me and so present. That is what I want to tell you at all costs – I often neglected to do so during that time. I can come for a few days as soon as I have time. And would you want to see me? – One hour, or two. Much, much love! Yours Ingeborg Celan to Bachmann, Paris, 26 January 1949 Ingeborg, Try for a moment to forget that I was silent for so long and so insistently – I had a great deal of sorrow, more than my brother could take from me,