NONFICTION - Sept. 17, 1995

PAUL CELAN/NELLY SACHS: Correspondence introduction by John Felstiner, translated by Christopher Clark (The Sheep Meadow Press: $19.95; 128 pp.) “Dear, wondrously deep, poet Paul Celan,” wrote Nelly Sachs early in their sixteen-year correspondence, “I inhale your work when I go to rest in the evening.” “Nelly Sachs, dear Nelly Sachs! I thank you, I thank you from my heart!” writes Celan. Some letters make it quite easy to enter the lives of the writers, and these are not among them, for there is so much that is unspoken between these two “survivor-poets.” Sachs and Celan admired each other by mail from 1954 to 1969, Celan from Paris and Sachs from Stockholm. Celan was finally motivated to begin the correspondence after reading Sachs’ poem, “Chorus of the Orphans” (“We orphans/We cry out to the world:/They have chopped off our branch/And thrown it into the fire . . . “) in a French journal. Both poets were haunted by World War II; Sachs was hospitalized in 1960 and given shock therapy, Celan drowned himself in the Seine in 1970. Their letters to each other expose some but not much of the terror they each lived with (“I am not in the open yet Paul, the net of fear and terror that they threw over me hasn’t yet been raised”); they are instead warm, supportive, hopeful and everyday; arrangements for publication or notes on travel. Many of the letters concern plans to meet (Sachs, Celan, his wife Gisele and their son), which they did in 1960 in Zurich. They were to meet again in 1966 in Stockholm when Sachs was awarded the Nobel prize, but that did not materialize. There is no palpable romantic tension and no rancor, just fondness and respect.