Search results for ""Author Nelly Sachs""

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.

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Known as a poet who spoke of the history and suffering of the Jewish people, Nelly Sachs was, at the time she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966, highly regarded in her native Germany, frequently being described as a poet of reconciliation and healing, although whether she was is open to debate.Because of the complexity of her later poetry, she is often regarded as a difficult poet, but her work is not difficult to understand if it is read against the backdrop of the events that gave rise to it, and in the context of her own development as a poet. Jean Boase-Beier’s striking translations focus on what she sees as Sachs’ very particular voice, one of outrage, despair, and grief, but also of enquiry, of irony, and often of straightforward anger.This chapbook, by presenting a small number of poems from throughout the poet’s main writing years and providing some general background together with short contextual explanations to individual poems, gives new readers a reason to read Nelly Sachs.

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