Translator’s Introduction: Nelly Sachs’s “Flight and Metamorphosis”

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 forties 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’s 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 fifties and early sixties 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 all 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 twenty or even forty years ago.