In May of 1940, a passenger plane left Berlin for Stockholm; among the travelers were two “non-Aryans,” Nelly Sachs and her mother. They had barely escaped arrest by the Gestapo. Sachs was on the cusp of fifty, her mother close to seventy. Sachs had been born into a wealthy secular Jewish family — her father was an inventor who made his fortune designing exercise equipment. But such bourgeois comfort was soon to end. Sachs’s father died, the Depression wiped out the family riches, and the Nazis, with the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws and subsequent anti-Semitic edicts, made it clear that the lives of German Jews were in peril. Through some almost-Herculean efforts by a number of advocates and supporters, Sachs and her mother were permitted to emigrate to Sweden. They were allowed to bring with them five marks, a coffee thermos, and a single small suitcase. There’s a photo of the suitcase in Aris Fioretos’s lavishly illustrated but ponderously written biography of Sachs, Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis (Stanford, 2011), the only bio available in English. The suitcase is scarcely larger than a gym bag.
It was not easy for them in Stockholm. Sachs struggled to learn Swedish, and lived with her mother in a tiny studio apartment. Prior to her escape from the Reich, she had written some poetry, and her verses had been featured in the Jewish-only periodicals which “Reich Minister for Enlightenment and Propaganda” Joseph Goebbels for a brief time allowed to be published. Fioretos translates passages from some of these efforts, and they seem the work of a poetaster of the mid-19th Century. Yet between the time of her arrival in Sweden and the publication of her first collection in 1947, Sachs transformed herself from a tyro writer to a quite formidable one. She left the 1800s behind, adopting free verse, and writing with the austere precision and clarity that are the hallmarks of early Modernism. This change cannot have been easy, either. Until her mother died in 1950, Sachs could work only late at night, with her mother asleep in the same room. Sachs struggled with mental illness, and endured several long stays in psychiatric hospitals. Although later in life she carried on extensive correspondences with fellow German-language poets, mostly notably Paul Celan and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Sachs’s 1940s were years of deprivation, anxiety, and isolation. But they turned her into the poet who, in 1966, shared the Nobel Prize in literature with Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon.
Sachs’s work falls squarely into two periods. Her initial phase, beginning with her first collection, In the Habitations of Death (1947), and ending with her third, And No One Knows How to Go On (1957), is a sustained and fugal threnody for the dead of the Shoah. The rituals of mourning are breathtakingly varied, thanks in no small measure to Sachs’s command of free verse prosody, a skill that derives not so much from Whitman as from the Psalms and the Book of Lamentations. The poems’ authorial voice is hushed but oracular, and the poems are punctuated by striking imagery that borders on the surreal. Unlike her fellow poet Celan, Sachs was someone whose current vernacular would label “a person of faith,” though her system of belief was complicated and grew ever more so as her career developed. The opening of a poem entitled “The Voice of the Holy Land” — in Ruth and Matthew Mead’s translation — gives you a reasonably good sense of her early method.
O my children,
Death has run through your hearts
As through a vineyard —
Painted Israel red on the walls of the world.
What shall be the end of the little holiness?
Which still dwells in my sand?
The voices of the dead
Speak through reed pipes of seclusion.
I suspect that it’s this sort of lament which prompted the Nobel committee to award Sachs its prize, and which earns Sachs her reputation as a poet of the Holocaust.
Sachs’s second phase is quite different from the first. She ceases to be an elegist and instead becomes a poet of devotional and spiritual ardor, in the tradition of figures such as Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, and St. John of the Cross. The poems grow more personal, more hermetic, and more associative. They seem to arise from a nocturnal solitude that is alternately abject and bracing, a liminal time and place where St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul is almost ending and resurrection again seems possible, but only after Sachs has surveyed our brokenness, our bewilderment, our ruins. This is Sachs’s imperial period, which begins with her fourth collection, Flight and Metamorphosis (1959), and culminates with a lengthy sequence — divided into four books — entitled Glowing Enigmas (1966). The poems reflect Sachs’s immersion in the Zohar and Kabbalah, and her reading of works such as Gershom Scholem’s classic study, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. (Scholem was another of Sachs’s correspondents: she shared her later poems with him, although he seems not to have thought much of them.)
One of the many virtues of Joshua Weiner’s new rendering of Flight and Metamorphosis — and his is the first English translation of the entire collection — is his highly valuable introduction to the volume. Weiner does a masterly job of elucidating the dumbfoundingly arcane system of the Kabbalah, and the profundity of its influence on Sachs’s later writing. And he manages to do so without showiness or pretense. Consider the following passage, which does its heavy lifting with a very light touch:
“If you’re a poet, the idea that what you’re doing creatively with language, in the invention of a poetic world, constitutes an act of imagination modeled on a divine process, a simulacrum of cosmic origination; that language worked into a higher medium of poetic form can close the distance between oneself and the divine; and even more, that one’s poetry participates in a restoration … across eons, of an ideal order; that what God conceives, creates, and develops through language could require participation through the devotional work of writing poetry.”
Like the mystical poets with whom she aligns herself, Sachs insists, over and over again, that such “devotional work” is hard labor. Of course, this is an obligation made even more demanding in the aftermath of the Shoah. Furthermore, she was tasked with fashioning her poems in a German which had been tainted and debased by the jargon of the Nazis. Celan felt the same unease, asserting in his famous Bremen address that he sought to purge the language of “death-bringing speech.” Celan accomplished this goal through radical linguistic experimentation. Sachs’s method is more subtle. Over the course of Flight and Metamorphosis, she seeks to formulate a haunted private liturgy. Not unlike W.S. Merwin in his poems of the late 1960s, she aims to strip language down to its essence, to eschew poetic devices and adornments, and to endow her lines with an atavistic primacy. She trafficks in sturdy archetypal tropes and symbols— sand, dust, inscription, metamorphosis, butterflies, flight, among others — but this nomenclature never seems static or hackneyed; everything’s repurposed, continually made incantatory and strange. As Weiner aptly puts it, her style is “an allusive web of shadings, inflections, and echoes.”
Needless to say, you need to read the entire collection to properly appreciate these qualities. But let me offer a sampling or two. The following poem (and all of them are untitled) appears late in the sequence:
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 —
I suspect, based on Weiner’s notes to another poem in the collection, that here Sachs is inspired by the Kabbalistic notion of the Shekinah, a manifestation of God’s presence on earth, who is often characterized as a bride in search of her divine groom. But you needn’t know this to appreciate the speaker’s yearning to fuse with some cosmic force, a desire that seems both erotic and self-annihilating. Sachs captures that ambivalent ardor with great dexterity and weirdly memorable imagery. I might add that, although Ezra Pound was of the opinion that that figurative language is the easiest poetic device to dependably translate, I suspect that in Sachs’s case the task of getting her metaphors to work in English is a bit more daunting. But Weiner seems up to the task. Compare his rendering of the poem’s second stanza to Michael Hamburger’s version of it, which sounds close to nonsensical: “Reined in / outside / I bend / thirstily / to kiss the end of all distances.” Hamburger is generally a quite dependable translator, but not here.
As a final example from the collection, let me offer a poem that — and pardon me if this characterization sounds reductive — begins in flight and closes with metamorphosis, and does so with exquisite brio:
WHEN THE BREATH
has built the hut of night
and goes out
to seek its drifting place in the heavens
and the body
the bleeding vineyard
has filled the casks of silence
the eyes have passed over
into the seeing light
when every last one
has vanished into its mystery
and everything is done twice—
birth
sings its way up every Jacob’s ladder of death’s pipe organs
then
a lovely lightning flash
ignites time —
John Logan, himself a noteworthy devotional poet, defined the poem as “a resurrecting act,” and I’m reminded of that characterization as I read these lines of Sachs. It’s quite a feat to make the ineffable process of spiritual questing seem so tangible, so corporeal. And here again the metaphors are uncanny yet exacting — the “Jacob’s ladder of death’s pipe organs,” the body as “the bleeding vineyard” that has “filled the casks of silence,” and so on. Furthermore, it is hard to read these lines without conjuring up an image of Sachs working and reworking them late into the night, alone in her cramped Stockholm apartment, her dread and mental anguish abated, if only for a moment. The years between her receipt of the Nobel and her death in 1970 seem to have done little to change her proscribed and solitary existence.
Let’s hope that Weiner’s translations are a harbinger of more English versions of Sachs’s work. Translations of Celan are something of a cottage industry — I just counted fourteen of them on my bookshelf — but translations of Sachs are close to non-existent. To capitalize on Sachs winning the Nobel, FSG quickly brought out two substantial selections of her work, but that was over fifty years ago; the books are long out of print, and their translations now seem rather creaky. These collections, Oh the Chimneys (1967) and The Seeker (1970), were notable mainly for Michael Hamburger’s renderings of Sachs’s masterwork, Glowing Enigmas, which Tavern Books gathered together from the two FSG books and reprinted in 2013. That collection seems to still be in print. This means that you can count on one hand the readily available English translations of a poet of enormous significance. That impoverishment seems to me a pity. Once you hear, even in translation, Sachs’s eerie and astringent music, and encounter her numinous fervor, you will surely be a convert.
[Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 15, 2022, 208 pages, $30.00 hardcover]