Correspondence

By: Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan

Narrated by: Francesca Ottley, Mark Young

Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights.

It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence.

Collected here for the first time in English are their letters, written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living - as a woman, as a man, as writers.

©2008 Seagull Books London Limited (P)2022 Seagull Books London Limited

Good, but incomplete and badly performed

The sometimes romance, sometimes friendship between Bachmann and Celan is one of the most remarkable literary relationships of the 20th century. Because of this, their correspondence is fascinating, but also beautiful and tragic. Unfortunately, this is an inferior audiobook version of a wonderful volume. First of all, the printed volume contains many footnotes giving the various letters context, and includes correspondence between Bachmann and Giselle Celan-Lestrange (Celan's wife), as well as between Celan and Max Frisch (Bachmann's lover). Without these materials, it will be difficult for a listener who has no context to catch on to much of the drama that is implicit between Bachmann and Celan - Celan's motives for leaving Vienna, his later descent into paranoia and depression, Bachmann's career ambitions, her own struggles with mental illness, the complicated friendships Bachmann and Celan had with each others' romantic partners, and so on.

Much more importantly, Mark Young is at best a middling narrator, and Francesca Ottley is a truly horrible one. Young's German pronunciation is flawed, but largely passable, and his performance is mostly flat. Ottley, though, consistently mispronounces German words and proper names so badly it's a constant distraction. In fact, she even mispronounces Celan's name, which is an oversight so egregious it can only be because she didn't bother to do the bare minimum of preparation for this performance. And, her performance is so devoid of emotion it sounded like the voice of a bored, resentful C- student asked to read a passage aloud in a class. Audible: please never hire her to perform anything ever again.