The Jewish writer 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 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.
Nelly Sachs, poet and playwright, was born in Berlin in 1891. Her first poems were published in 1929. In 1940 she and her mother fled to Sweden, where she was granted nationality in 1952. Her correspondence with Paul Celan began in 1954. In 1966 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She died in 1970.
Andrew Shanks is a now retired Church of England priest; for ten years Canon Theologian at Manchester Cathedral. He has published numerous works of philosophical theology; including “What Is Truth?” Towards a Theological Poetics (2001), and most recently Sublime Virtue: “Sainthood”, as Rendered Problematic by a Dozen Novelists(2023). Having first discovered the poetry of Nelly Sachs forty years ago, in a bookshop in Marburg, he has been steadily at work on his translations/imitations pretty much ever since.
• This collection revives the Nobel Prize-winning German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, who became a great poet in her fifties, as a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, living in Sweden
• Her poetry begins as a monumental lament for the victims of the Holocaust but continues to develop other themes: biblical, Kabbalist and religious allusions, personal bereavement, and mental breakdown
• This dual-language book includes all the lyric poetry Sachs published in her lifetime and adds the posthumous collection Teile dich Nacht, an introductory essay, and notes
