| Title | : | Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0374157081 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780374157081 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1959 |
So far out, in the open,
cushioned in sleep.
In flight from the land
with love's heavy luggage.
A butterfly-zone of dreams
like an open parasol
held up against the truth.
Flight and Metamorphosis marks the culmination of Nelly Sachs’s development as a poet. Sachs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, speaks from her own condition as a refugee from Nazi Germany―her loneliness while living in a small Stockholm flat with her elderly mother; her exile, her alienation, her feelings of romantic bereavement; and her search for the divine. Forced onto a journey of endless change, Sachs created her own path forward.
From these sublime poems, she emerges as a visionary, one who harnesses language’s essential power to create and transform our world. Joshua Weiner’s translations (with Linda B. Parshall) are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs’s enduring poetic power and relevance.
Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition Reviews
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This is the only collection I've come across by 1966 Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs, a collection of her poems entitled FLIGHT AND METAMORPHOSIS, translated from the German.
Larger themes touch on mysticism and cosmology, Biblical allusions, and nature and life cycles. Often cryptic and open to interpretation, as the translator notes, this tone transcends in both German and English.
The book includes a lengthy introductory essay and biographical sketch of Sachs, who left Germany before the War due to her Jewish ethnicity, and lived the rest of her life in Sweden. -
9/10 but rounding up, I was so happy to find this by chance at my local bookstore because Sachs' work is hard to get in the US, at least in my experience! The poems are often cryptic and surreal so I need to spend more time with them but there are so many stunning lines.
"In place of home,/I hold the metamorphoses of the world." -
After forgiveness of this life
out of such writing, consumed
exhausted, spent—
out of the singular second
the inner ocean lifts
Its white crown of silence
in blissfulness, to you—
Uma poesia que no seu intensivo discurso expressionista nos emoldura numa supressão presente de um discurso sobre mundo. -
I enjoyed reading this
In old age
“Death barely ripened is already reseeded the sacred oil drawn up from graves. I’m not the resurrection stars scorch the darkness. And again, God is ready to depart.”
Here there’s no staying longer
“Whoever’s crying is searching for his melody which the wind leafed with music has hidden in night.”
Already
“Darkness widowed bent over in grief thunders the long painful cry of fertility in ravaged skies.”
If someone comes
“A stranger always has his homeland in his arms like an orphan for whom he may be seeking nothing but a grave.”
O that one understands so little
“O Soul - forgive my wanting to lead you back to so many hearths of rest. Rest which is only a dead oasis-word” -
As Durs Grünbein says on the back, "This is truly the next step after Michael Hamburger's earlier translation efforts on her behalf. Here is Nelly Sachs for the next generation of English-speaking readers." This is pure lyrical poetry, carrying the tradition of Trakl & Rilke while also conversing with contemporary concerns. I first read Sachs at least 15 years ago and this is the first time that her poetry came alive for me. Extraordinary!
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Read full review:
https://bodyliterature.com/2022/03/11...
Themes of flight and metamorphosis animate each page of the book. These poems explore the changes wrought by flight as in fleeing from, forced travel, emigration, leaving with no guarantee you will return, sometimes knowing you won’t. Sachs was familiar with painful changes of location and emotional scope, as well as the joyful, sometimes unexpected transformations that come with gradually discovering your own life in a new place, a new culture, landscape and language.
Sachs’ poems are wise. And they are stoic. And yes, sometimes cryptic, but often astounding. Weiner has rendered the powerful, haunting poems of Flucht und Verwandlung in accessibly magisterial English. Flight and Metamorphosis will stand as a crucial contribution: the definitive English translation of this collection, one of the most powerful Sachs wrote.
Nelly Sachs was much more than a passive poet of witness. She was a stoic, vatic poet wrestling with the limits of language and our ability to comprehend God in a world exiled from innocence. -
I was able to read this thru Net Galley. I was very excited as this was my first book I received from them.
Now the review,
Nelly Sachs is a very impressive poet and her prose can be powerful at times.
The beginning ( it feels like 100 pages) read like an academic text. -
Nelly Sachs expresses what can be considered unephable. ‘Flight and Metamorphosis’ distills the wound of having no home, of escaping death, of living a different death, of not having a place to go but to exist in an in-between state without a State.
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Not for me.
Hard to tell if the German originals had more magic to them, but these poems felt very dull and uninteresting to me. I don't see the mystical power that the translator claims is there.
