Lorand Gaspar et Paul Celan, « derrière le dos de Dieu »

Lorand Gaspar (1925-2019) and Paul Celan (1920-1970) were students and poets in exile in Paris after World War II, both from Mitteleuropa. They never met, neither talked about each other yet. They shared the Eastern Europa multicultural culture and history, they spoke Rumanian, German, French, English, Russian, Arabic, all languages from which (or to which) they translated major poets like Rimbaud, Rilke, Valéry, D.H. Lawrence, Pilinszky or Mandelstam. They crossed the tragedy of war and violence. Celan’s parents, as Jews, were killed in a work camp in Transnistria, and Paul fled to Paris via Bucarest and Vienna. Gaspar, born in Târgu Mureș in Transylvania and of Hungarian culture, escaped from a German prisoners camp and walked towards Paris. As European poets in German and in French, they assumed a modernist conception of poetry which could have brought them closer, in spite of political divergences and different conceptions of life.