One heart is aflame, a second afloat downriver. They can only meet on the ‘heart’s time’. The meeting of lifelong poets Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) and Paul Celan (1920–1970) in post-war Vienna comprised a collision between two opposite poles of trauma. Bachmann’s father was an officer in the Austrian army, while Celan’s parents died in a concentration camp – and he narrowly escaped mass transport himself. However, the two were as one in their relationship to language, their only real home – and simultaneously punishment and source of misunderstanding. It was through language that they were able to find, lose, hurt and heal each other. Marking the passage of time and the journey of life, the fragments of their letters, unsent concepts and verses, constitute a body of shared imagination, a dream of the Other, of a creative and amorous harmony which is more often a figment of imagination than a reality. To what extent is it in fact possible to represent and depict our world through language itself?