Unter der Kuppel

What did Paul Celan see and think during his walks through the streets of Paris in May '68? What did the German language and Germany mean to him? How did he translate his own poems into French? How did he write, with what, when, and where? How did he experience the psychiatric clinic, the separation from his wife Gisèle, and the move to a new apartment? Jean Daive's testimony makes Celan's difficult, increasingly shadowed life path readable, accompanying him through their conversations along the poems written during that time. It always involves questions about the relationship between language and the world, not only in terms of translation and translatability but also as literature's response to the events of life, to the fundamental legibility or illegibility of the world. Jean Daive's very intimate account is one of the few life testimonies about the later years of Paul Celan before his suicide. The two poets met in the late sixties after Celan became aware of Daive's poems. Daive's first poetry collection, Décimale blanche (White Decimal, 1967), would remain Celan's last major translation.