Nelly
Sachs (Germany)
1891-1970
Nelly
Sachs grew up in Berlin, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. She was
educated privately, with emphasis on the arts, and at the age of seventeen, she
began to write, producing a neoromantic poetry, work she later rejected. In
1921 she published Legenden und Erzählungen, which consisted of legends and
tales. Her verse appeared in various German newspapers throughout the
mid-1930s. But in that same period, her life was caught up in the tragic events
of the German Jews, as she watched friends and family sent to their doom. In
1940, she and her mother escaped to Sweden, through the help of Swedish author
Selma Lagerlöf, Prince Eugene of the Swedish Royal Court, and German friend,
Gudrun Harlan Dähnert.
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It was while living in Sweden, living in fear
and agitation, that she began again to write. "Writing is my mute outcry;
I only wrote because I had to free myself," she observed. Beginning with
her verse play, Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels (Eli: A
Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel), written in 1943 and published in
1951, she produced several volumes of powerful poetry, each seeking answers for
the horrors of the holocaust and a reconciliation with the past. Her
masterworks include In den Wohnungen des Todes (written from 1944-45,
published in 1947), Sternverdunkelung (1949), Und neimand weiss
weiter (1957), and Fluch und Verwandlung (1959). In 1961, upon the
occasion of her seventieth birthday, her publisher Suhrkamp collected her
poetry under the title Fahrt ins Stablose (Journey Into a Dustless
Realm). Other collections, Späte Gedichte (1965), Glühende Rätsel
(1965), Die Suchende (1966), and Teile dich Nacht (1971),
followed.
In 1966 Sachs shared the Nobel Prize for
Literature with Israeli author S. Y. Agnon. She died of cancer in 1970 in
Stockholm.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
In
den Wohnungendes Todes (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1947); Sternverdunkelung
(Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer/Querido-Verlag; Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1949); Und
neimand weiss weier (Hamburg: Verlag Heinrich Ellermann, 1957); Flucht
und Verwandulung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstatt, 1959); Fahrt ins
Staublose (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961); Glühende Rätsel
(Suhrkamp Verlag/Insel-Verlag, 1965); Späte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965); Die Suchende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1966); Suche nach Lebendam (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1971); Teile dich Nacht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971).
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
O
the Chimneys
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967); The Seeker and Other Poems
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970); Collected Poems: 1944-1949
(Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2010); Glowing Enigmas, trans. by Michael
Hamburger (2013); Flight and Metamorphosis, trans. by Joshua Weiner and
Linda B. Parshall (New York: Macmillan, 2022).
O
the night of the weeping children!
O
the night of the weeping children!
O
the night of the children branded for death!
Sleep
may not enter here.
Terrible
nursemaids
Have
usurped the place of mothers,
Have
tautened their tendons with the false death,
Sow
it on to the walls and into the beams --
Everywhere
it is hatched in the nests of horror.
Instead
of mother's milk, panic suckles those little ones.
Yesterday
Mother still drew
Sleep
toward them like a white moon,
There
was the doll with cheeks derouged by kisses
In
one arm,
The
stuffed pet, already
Brought
to life by love,
In
the other─
Now
blows the wind of dying,
Blows
the shifts over the hair
That
no one will comb again.
─Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
(from
In de Wohnungendes Todes, 1947)
And
we who move away
And
we who move away
beyond
all leaves of the windrose
heavy
inheritance into the distance.
Myself
here,
where
earth is losing its lineaments
the
Pole,
death's
white dead nettle
falls
in the stillness of white leaves
the
elk,
peering
through blue curtains
between
his antlers bears
a
sun-egg hatched pale─
Here,
where ocean time
camouflages
itself with iceberg masks
under
the last star's
frozen
stigma
here
at this place
I
expose the coral,
the
one that bleeds
with
your message.
─Translated
from the German by Michael Roloff
(from
Und neimand weiss weiter, 1957)
Bewitched
is half of everything
Bewitched
is half of everything.
Downward
wanders the light
into
obscurities─
no
knife unscales the night.
Solace
lives far
behind
the homesickness scar.
Perhaps
where
a different green speaks with tongues
and
the seas abandon themselves timelessly.
The
enigmas' trail of comets
erupts
in death,
glows
when
the soul
gropes
home along its railing.
True,
cows graze in the foreground,
clover
is fragrant with honey
and
the stop buries what angel's forgot.
Awakening
clangs in the city
but
to cross bridges
is
only to reach a job.
Milk
rattles in cans on the street
for
all who imbibe death as their last taste.
The
laughing gull above the water
still
has a drop of madness
from
living-in-the-backwoods.
Melusine,
your
landless part
is
preserved in our tear.
─Translated
from the German by Michael Roloff
(from
Und neimand weiss weiter, 1957)
Night,
night
Night,
night,
that
you may not shatter in fragments
now
when the time sinks with the ravenous suns
of
martyrdom
in
your sea-covered depths─
the
moons of death
drag
the falling roof of earth
into
the congealed blood of your silence.
Night,
night,
once
you were the bride of mysteries
adorned
with lilies of shadow─
In
your dark glass sparkled
the
mirage of all who yearn
and
love had set its morning rose
to
blossom before you─
You
were once the oracular mouth
of
dream painting and mirrored the beyond.
Night,
night,
now
you are the graveyard
for
the terrible shipwreck of a star─
time
sinks speechless in you
with
its sign:
The
falling stone
and
the flag of smoke.
─Translated
from the German by Ruth and Matthew Mead
(from
Und neimand weiss weiter, 1957
O
sister
O
sister,
where
do you pitch your tent?
In
the black chicken-run
you
call the brood of your madness
and
rear them.
The
cock's trumpet
crows
wounds into the air─
You
have fallen from the nest
like
a naked bird
passers-by
eye
that
brazenness.
True
to your native land
you
sweep the roaring meteors
back
and forth with a nightmare broom
before
the flaming gates of paradise...
Dynamite
of impatience
pushes
you out to dance
on
the tilted flashes of inspiration.
Your
body gapes points of view
you
recover the lost
dimensions
of the pyramids
Birds
sitting
in the branches of your eye
twitter
to you the blossoming geometry
of
a map of stars.
Night
unfolds
a
chrysalis of enigmatic moss
in
your hand
until
you hold the wing-breathing butterfly of morning
quivering─
quivering─with
a cry
you
drink its blood.
─Translated
from the German by Ruth and Matthew Mead
(from
Sternverdunkelung, 1959)
Line
like
Line
like
living
hair
drawn
deathnightobscured
from
you
to
me.
Reined
in
outside
I
bend
thirstily
to
kiss the end of all distances.
Evening
throws
the springboard
of
night over the redness
lengthens
your promontory
and
hesitant I place my foot
on
the trembling string
of
my death already begun.
But
such is love─
─Translated
from the German by Michael Hamburger
(from
Flucht und Verwandlung, 1959)
Vainly
Vainly
the
epistles burn
in
the night of nights
on
the pyre of flight
for
love winds itself out of its thornbush
flogged
in martyrdom
and
with its tongue of flames
is
beginning to kiss the invisible sky
when
vigil casts darknesses on the wall
and
the air
trembling
with premonition
prays
with the noose of the hunter
blowing
in with the wind:
Wait
till
the letters have come home
from
the blazing desert
and
been eaten by scared mouths
Wait
till
the ghostly geology of love
is
torn open
and
its millennia
aglow
and shining with blessed pointing fingers
have
rediscovered love's word of creation:
there
on the paper
that
dying sings:
It
was
at
the beginning
It
was
My
beloved
It
was─
─Translated
from the German by Michael Roloff
How
many blinkings of eyelashes
when
horror came
no
eyelid to be lowered
and
a heap of time put together
painted
over the air's humility
This
can be put on paper only
with
one eye ripped out─
You
painted the signal
red
with your blood
warning
of destruction
moist
on the borders
but
still without birth
When
suffering settles homeless
it
expels superfluity
Tears
are orphans─expelled
in
one bound we follow
that
is flight into the Beyond
of
the rootless palm tree of time─
(from
Glühende Rätsel, 1965)
PERMISSIONS
“O
the night of the weeping children!” “And we who move away,” “Bewitched is half
of everything,” “Night, night,” “O sister,” “Line like,” “Vainly,” and [“How
many blinkings of eyelashes’]. Reprinted from O The Chimneys (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967) and The Seeker and Other Poems (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Green
Integer.
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