Here are the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the day Celan was buried. 'What Paul Celan once said of his mother tongue holds as well for Nelly Sachs: 'Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech'. Sachs put it this way: 'The frightful experiences that brought me to the edge of death and darkness are my tutors. If I couldn't have written, I wouldn't have survived...my metaphors are my wounds'. From the Introduction.
Author Biography
Paul Celan was born Paul Ancel of a Jewish family in Romania in 1920. In 1942 his parents were deported and died in an extermination camp. Celan escaped but was in a labour camp until 1944. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he took up the study of German literature and became a lecturer at the Aecole Normale Superieur. Paris remained his home until his suicide by drowning in 1970.
