But maybe
in a smokecloud of error
we have
created a wandering cosmos
with the language of our breath —
Have we
time and again
sounded the fanfare
of the beginning
shaped the grain of sand
quick as wind
before, once more, there was light
above the bud of the embryo?
And again
we are encircled
in your districts, and again,
though we don’t recall the night
nor the depths of the sea
with our teeth we bite off
the star-veins of words.
And still we work your field
behind death’s back.
Maybe the detours of man’s fall
are like the secret desertions of meteors
marked in the alphabet of storms
alongside rainbows–
And who knows
the course of becoming fertile
how seeds bend up
out of depleted soil
for the suckling mouths
of light.
/ / /
Aber vielleicht
haben wir
vor Irrtum Rauchende
doch ein wanderndes Weltall geschaffen
mit der Sprache des Atems?
Immer wieder die Fanfare
des Anfangs geblasen
das Sandkorn in Windeseile geprägt
bevor es wieder Licht ward
über der Geburtenknospe
des Embryos?
Und sind immer wieder
eingekreist
in deinen Bezirken
auch wenn wir nicht der Nacht gedenken
und der Tiefe des Meeres
mit Zähnen abbeißen
der Worte Sterngeäder.
Und bestellen doch deinen Acker
hinter dem Rücken des Todes.
Vielleicht sind die Umwege des Sündenfalles
wie der Meteore heimliche Fahnenfluchten
doch im Alphabet der Gewitter
eingezeichnet neben den Regenbögen–
Wer weiß auch
die Grade des Fruchtbarmachens
und wie die Saaten gebogen werden
aus fortgezehrten Erdreichen
für die saugenden Münder
des Lichts.
* * * * *
So it’s said —
drawn in snaking lines
plunge.
The sun
Chinese mandala
divinely warped jewel
turned in inward phases
back home twisting,
smile fixed
in constant prayer
light-dragon
spitting at time
the shield bearer was earth’s wind-fallen fruit
once
scorching-bright gold —
Prophecies
point with flaming fingers:
This is the star
husked to death —
This is the apple’s core
sown in the solar eclipse
so we fall
so we fall.
/ / /
So ist’s gesagt
mit Schlangenlinien aufgezeichnet
Absturz.
Die Sonne
chinesisch Mandala
heilig verzogener Schmuck
zurück in innere Phasen heimgekehrt
starres Lächeln
fortgebetet
Lichtdrachen
zeitanspeiend
Schildträger war die Fallfrucht Erde
einst
goldangegleist –
Weissagungen
mit Flammenfingern zeigen:
Dies ist der Stern
geschält bis auf den Tod —
Dies ist des Apfels Kerngehäuse
in Sonnenfinsternis gesät
so fallen wir
so fallen wir.
* * * * *
For a long time
Jacob
with the blessing of his arm
scythed down
the grain of millennia
hanging in the sleep of the dead —
saw
with blind eyes —
held suns and stars
in his arms
for a bright blissful moment —
till finally all leapt
like birth from his hand
and
into Rembrandt’s celestial eye.
Joseph
still tried
quickly
to deflect
the flash of false blessing
already flaring up
God-knows-where —
And the firstborn went out
like embers —
/ / /
Lange
sichelte Jakob
mit seines Armes Segen
die Ähren der Jahrtausende
die in Todesschlaf hängenden
nieder —
sah
mit Blindenaugen —
hielt Sonnen und Sterne
einen Lichtblick umarmt —
bis es endlich hüpfte
wie Geburt aus seiner Hand
und
in Rembrandts Augenhimmel hinein.
Joseph
schnell noch
versuchte den Blitz
des falschen Segens
abzuleiten
der aber brannte schon
Gott-wo-anders auf —
Und der Erstegeborene losch
wie Asche —
* * * * *
Line like
living hair
drawn
deathnight-darkened
from you
to me.
Bridled
on the outside
I am bowed down
thirsting to kiss
the end of distances.
The evening
is throwing the springboard
of night over the crimson
lengthening your headland
and I place my foot, hesitating,
on the quivering string
of death, already begun
But such is love- –
/ / /
Linie wie
lebendiges Haar
gezogen
todnachtgedunkelt
von dir
zu mir.
Gegängelt
außerhalb
bin ich hinübergeneigt
durstend
das Ende der Fernen zu küssen.
Der Abend
wirft das Sprungbrett
der Nacht über das Rot
verlängert deine Landzunge
und ich setze meinen Fuß zagend
auf die zitternde Saite
des schon begonnenen Todes
Aber so ist die Liebe —
* * * * *
Deep inside
the station of suffering
possessed by a smile
you answer
those
who question in the shadows
their mouths full of god-deformed words
hammered out
from pain’s distant past.
Love no longer wears a shroud,
space is spun
in the thread of your longing.
Stars ricochet
back from your eyes
sunsubstance
softly turning to char
but over your head
Stella Maris, lodestar of certainty,
glows ruby red
with the arrows of resurrection —
/ / /
Inmitten
der Leidensstation
besessen von einem Lächeln
gibst du Antwort
denen
die im Schatten fragen
mit dem Mund voll gottverzogener Worte
aufgehämmert
aus der Vorzeit der Schmerzen.
Die Liebe hat kein Sterbehemd mehr an
versponnen der Raum
im Faden deiner Sehnsucht.
Gestirne prallen rückwärts ab
von deinen Augen
diesem
leise verkohlenden Sonnenstoff
aber über deinem Haupte
der Meeresstern der Gewißheit
mit den Pfeilen der Auferstehung
leuchtet rubinrot —
* * * * *
Behind the lips
the unutterable waits
tears at the umbilical cords
of words
the martyr’s death of the alphabet
in the mouth’s urn
spiritual ascension
out of searing pain —
But the breath of inner speech
through the wailing wall of air
whispers a confession freed of secrets,
sinks into the asylum
of the world’s wound
even in its downfall
still overheard by God —
/ / /
Hinter den Lippen
Unsagbares wartet
reißt an den Nabelsträngen
der Worte
Märtyrersterben der Buchstaben
in der Urne des Mundes
geistige Himmelfahrt
aus schneidendem Schmerz —
Aber der Atem der inneren Rede
durch die Klagemauer der Luft
haucht geheimnisentbundene Beichte
sinkt ins Asyl
der Weltenwunde
noch im Untergang
Gott abgelauscht —
* * * * *
Joshua Weiner on Nelly Sachs
The Jewish-German (naturalized Swedish) poet Nelly Sachs was born in 1891, in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, to a bourgeois and assimilated family. Frail of health and sheltered for much of her childhood, Sachs wrote poems and stories that show the deep influence of German Romanticism, an influence she would later distill and refract through more modernist techniques and perspectives into some of the first powerful responses to the Holocaust in poetry, poems in which she discovered her mature voice as a poet and made her reputation.
As a young woman she absorbed at some remove the fin-de-siècle atmosphere around the Stefan George circle, her poetry and prose appearing in local newspapers including, after the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, Jewish community publications; her marionette plays from this time also found modest production. Sachs never really took much part in the Berlin literary scene around figures such as Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht, but lived in the familiar margin, like most writers, of being both known and unknown. (Readers of German lyric poets such as Gertrud Kolmar and Else Lasker-Schüler may detect some influences there, though Sachs’s later turn from lyric conventions sets her apart.) The story of her narrow escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden in 1940 with the help of close friends in Berlin; the last minute aid of powerful friends from afar (such as the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, also an influence on her early writing); and even a sympathetic police officer who told her to avoid the trains, reads like a 1940’s Hollywood script.
The reception of the poems she wrote in the forties, in which she takes on the personae and speaks through voices of the Shoah’s murdered Jews, has a history complicated by the politics of reconciliation (between Jews and Germans) after WWII, East Germany being more receptive than West to grappling with the immediate crimes of the Nazi state; these have also become, paradoxically, the poems most readers know, and the most widely anthologized in English translation. But such poems don’t define the force of Sachs’ oeuvre. A poet whose voice was forged in the Holocaust, she is not a “Holocaust poet” per se, but one who wrote her way through the horror of the Shoah and into a poetry of the eternal refugee, a poetry influenced, as well, by her studies in Jewish Kabbalah. It was these poems of the 50’s and early 60’s that became more widely read in Germany thanks to the advocacy of younger poets such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger; a broader recognition was thereby launched that culminated in her receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor she shared with the Israeli fiction writer, S. Y. Agnon, in 1966. Sachs died in 1970, the day her dear friend, her “brother” survivor, the poet Paul Celan, was buried.
The poems in this selection are drawn from Sachs’s 1959 volume, Flucht und Verwandlung (Flight and Metamorphosis), which marks the culmination in a period of her development as a poet. (The original order of the poems is maintained here.) In this book-length sequence of poems, Sachs turns from speaking through the murdered of the Shoah to speaking more for herself, her own condition of being a refugee from Nazi Germany—her loneliness living in a small Stockholm flat with her elderly mother, her exile, her alienation, her feelings of romantic bereavement, her search for the divine, even as she sees with visionary power the state of continual flight and asylum-seeking as a historical, political, spiritual, and legendary experience that shapes the lives of Jews through time (although in the period before and immediately after WWII, it was no more an exclusive condition than it is now). In these poems, we hear a Nelly Sachs who is closer to us today than she was 20 or even 40 years ago.
/ / /
The six poems published here, in German with English translations, appear in Flight and Metamorphosis, poems by Nelly Sachs, a bilingual edition published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on March 14, 2022, translated by Joshua Weiner with Linda B. Marshall. We are grateful to Joshua Weiner for permission to include the poems here with his remarks. You may order the book from Bookshop.org by clicking here.