Ulrich Plass

Jason Kavett ’09 translates Paul Celan’s letters to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange

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Jason Kavett ’09 has translated the correspondence between the poet Paul Celan and his wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. His translation appears in the New York Review Books Poets imprint:

“Letters to Gisèle presents the letters Celan wrote to his wife, the French visual artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, over the course of close to twenty years, along with letters to the couple’s son, Eric, and letters from Gisèle to Paul. They provide an intimate view of his literary career and troubled life, which was marked by repeated stays in psychiatric clinics. They also provide an unparalleled glimpse into Celan’s poetic workshop, including his own word-for-word renderings from German into French of more than a dozen of his poems. These he addressed to Gisèle as an ongoing, informal German lesson. They figure too as messages from the heart. Presented here trilingually, these overlapping versions of Celan’s poems open up new dimensions of his famously hermetic poetry, as dazzling as it is dark.“

Jason’s translation has been reviewed in the New York Times and the Chicago Review of Books.

Wensinger and Lensing on Enzensberger

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In memory of poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who recently passed away at the age of 93, retired German Studies professors Jerry Wensinger and Leo Lensing published commemorative articles in the “Geisteswissenschaften” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 15, 2023. For historical background, Enzensberger had been offered a yearlong fellowship at Wesleyan’s Institute for Advanced Studies (now the Center for the Humanities), but in January 1968 resigned after only a semester to move to Cuba “to work there for a substantial period of time,” as he explained in his resignation letter to Wesleyan president Etherington. On campus, he had been disturbed by the quiescent attitude towards the militarism of the Johnson administration, an attitude he found reflected in how people talked about US politics: “a new crop of words has been banished, by common consent, from polite society: words like “exploitation”  and “imperialism.” They have acquired a touch of obscenity. Political scientists have taken to paraphrases and circumlocution which sound like the neurotic euphemisms of the Victorians. Some sociologists have gone so far as to deny the very existence of a ruling class. Obviously, it is easier to abolish the word “exploitation” than the thing it designates; but then, to do away with the term is not to do away with the problem.”

Cherry Blossoms – A German movie with English subtitles

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The Middletown International Film Festival presents Cherry Blossoms – Kirschblüten – Hanami by Doris Dörrie, with an introduction by Associate Professor Iris Bork-Goldfield.

Doris Dörrie’s bittersweet film beautifully juxtaposes German and Japanese culture and tells the story of mourning and the futility of trying to recover something lost.

The screening will be at 7:00 p.m., on Thursday, October 13, 2011, at Wesleyan University’s Center for Film Studies

Admission is free