German–Hebrew Encounters in the Poetry and Correspondence of Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan

Abstract

In 1969, Paul Celan visited Jerusalem, where he was hosted by Yehuda Amichai. After Celan returned to his home in Paris, they exchanged two letters. But this does not exhaust the correspondence between them. As this paper shows, Amichai’s conversation with Celan—in a broad sense of the term—began long before they met and continued through his last book, Open, Closed, Open . Interrogating the concept of a poetic encounter or a correspondence in poetry, I argue that the basis for the dialogue between Celan and Amichai was their shared German–Hebrew bilingualism. The paper deals with previously unpublished bilingual poems from the Yehuda Amichai Archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and shows how these materials correspond both with Celan’s poetry and with Amichai’s published work.