Correspondence

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by Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs

Sheep Meadow Press

Due/Published September 1998, 112 pages, paper

ISBN 1878818716

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 "deathbringing speech"" -- (from Felstiner's Introduction).