Full Description
Winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024
Winner of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize 2024
The
Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) writes in direct response to the
Holocaust. She is uniquely a 'prophetic' poet, one of the greatest of
that species in the twentieth century.
Her first book appeared in
the immediate wake of the Second World War, in 1946. Since that time,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger declared, 'she has been writing fundamentally a
single book'. That book is represented in this volume which reveals her
whole progression rendered into English. Unlike earlier translators,
Andrew Shanks calls his versions 'translations/imitations', moving away
from the doggedly literal to render more faithfully the sense and
intention of the originals.
Sachs escaped Berlin in May 1940. She
found refuge in Sweden. Her major work is an evolving response to the
trauma of the Holocaust. In 1966 she received the Nobel Prize for
Literature. This book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in
her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes.
Her
poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust.
Other themes develop: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions,
personal bereavement, mental breakdown. And there are reflections on
poetic vocation in the darkness of recent history.
