Celan and the light

Four essays and four Celan letters

TonNaijkens and Erik Lindner

For this edition, essayist and Celan translator TonNaijkens translated four special letters from Paul Celan, in which he drops his pseudonym and tells what the Shoah meant to him. With 'De Letters van Celan',Naijkens introduces extensive correspondence. In another essay he explores the relationship of the poet Celan to the light, for him a metaphor for the life he felt compelled to live. The Dutch poet Erik Lindner does not write about light, but about its perceiving organ: the place of the eye in Celan's poetry. In an essay about Celan and the visual arts, Naijkens writes about, among other things, the important role that the engravings of Celan's wife Gisele Lestrange play for his work and the relationship between poetry and etching. This publication is the second part of the series 'The literary witness'.