Out this week: Paul Celan’s Letters to Gisèle, a big collection of the poet’s missives to his wife, the French artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. 💌 The letters cover twenty years of their relationship, during and after the end of their marriage. Celan, known for his dark and difficult poems, writes letters that are at turns tender and doting, anxious and haunted, many spilling over with declarations of love for Gisèle. In these letters, Celan sometimes translates his poems into French for the benefit of his Francophone wife, creating versions of his poems that exist nowhere else, many of them quite different from their published form. On the whole, the letters give a glimpse into the mind of a significant artist, one of the most important of the 20th century. The book also includes letters from Celan to his son Eric. #paulcelan #giselecelanlestrange #poetry #translation #translatedliterature