Conversation in the Mountains

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born Paul Antschel of a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Romania. He was sent to a labor camp during World War II.  After the war, he settled in Paris where he lived with his wife Gisèle Lestrange until his death. He is widely considered to be one of the most innovative and important poets of the twentieth century. Rosmarie Waldrop, born in Germany in 1935, is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and a noted translator of French and German poetry. Her most recent books are The Nick of Time, Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Book Prize), and Driven to Abstraction.

"For Celan, whose poems moved ever closer to silence, prose was too noisy a medium. It is indeed fortunate that various occasions prodded him to write these texts. They are invaluable for defining the place from which Celan writes."