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Nelly Sachs was the co-winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature. This book, containing nearly half of her verse, is her first to be published in the English language. The book includes in its entirety one of her most important poem sequences, 'Glowing Enigmas, I, II, and III,' written in the 1960's; poems from six other collections: 'In the Habitations of Death,' 'Eclipse of the Stars,' 'And No One Knows How to Go On,' 'Flight and Metamorphosis, Journey into a Dustless Realm,' and 'Death Still Celebrates Life'; and the complete text of 'Eli,' a mystery play of the sufferings of Israel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The impossibility of poetry
This is not something one merely reads for the pleasure or leisure of literature.Where speech and hope became impossible, Nelly Sachs stared with angelic, orphan eyes ("through the black folds of night") into the hopeless abyss of the death chambers and gathered, both tenderly and damningly, words that just as radically confront us today.Her poetry is a poetry of those murdered many who "might have plucked stars from the sky".Yet she dares not speak for them, but for their tragic, inviolable absence. This is literature belonging to a remainder that should not be, words that arise from the impossibility of speech.Poems such as You Onlookers pierce our complacency over the increasing political use of racism and anti-immigration more than any radical leftist tract can, making me at least no longer complacent.For this racism - be it against the Roma in France or boat-people in Australia - shares the same roots and is permitted via the same complacency as that which stood by and allowed Nazism to grasp the imagination of the German nation.
How can one even attempt to review these poems without reducing their force and the space from which they arise to mere literary history, which is to say to a discourse that constrains them and the unthinkable horror of the holocaust to a mere genre or tradition.One must read them and have the courage to be rent by them, for they rend like no poems i have encountered before.They reduce one to tears and make forgetfulness impossible.As the tangible memory of the Holocaust slowly fades with the death of the generation of survivors, perpetrators and onlookers, it is time we returned to Nelly Sachs' poems so we can see with sober senses what we, as humans, are capable of, and what we are culpable for if we remain complacent onlookers to the continuing injustices humans inflict on one another, whether in the name of nationalism or blatant xenophobia, today.

The great pain written about in a delicate and subtle way
Nelly Sachs writes about the most painful subject the losses of the Shoah in a delicate and subtle way. She does not have the kind of complexity or dimension of her co- Nobel Prize winner Agnon, but she has a voice and a language truly her own.
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By any account, German-speaking Jews have made among the greatest contributions to world culture in this century--one thinks of Wittgenstein and Husserl in philosophy, Freud in psychoanalysis, Kafka in fiction, and Paul Celan in poetry. Yet most Jews were exiled from German-speaking lands (when they were not murdered there), and they have never been integrated within German culture as such.

The poet Nelly Sachs, who won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for her poetry on the Holocaust, and the critic Walter Benjamin are two such German- Jewish writers: born just over a century ago in Berlin and exiled from Germany in the 1930s, both were acclaimed after World War II (Benjamin posthumously), yet neither, to this day, is anything but an outsider to German literature. The present collection of essays addresses the uneasy relationship between Jews who are masters of the German language and the German literary tradition that still cannot accept the otherness of Jewish writers.

After a biographical and historical introduction by the volume's two editors, individual chapters are devoted to Sachs, to Benjamin, to their comparison, and to Sachs in an international context. Topics explored include the Jewish themes and motifs in Sachs's distinctive verse-dramas; the limits of poetic metaphor with respect to representations of the Holocaust; the relationship of Benjamin's theories of dramatic language to Sachs's verse- dramas; and Benjamin's theories of language, imagery, and gesture in the contexts of Western philosophy, German literature, and Jewish thought.

Before now, no work in any language has brought Sachs and Benjamin scholarship together under a single cover. Looking at these two internationally known and celebrated authors together reconfigures both the ways we understand them-- neither just "Jewish writers," nor indifferently German authors--and the ways we understand German literature.

Timothy Bahti is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan. Marilyn Sibley Fries was Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

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