Nelly Sachs was the joint winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, along with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Born in Berlin in 1891, she had fled to Sweden in 1840, thanks to the intervention of Selma Lagerlöf just before her death. She made a living in Sweden as a translator to and from German, and started publishing poetry only in 1947.

I got hold of the collection, O, the Chimneys, published in 1967, the year after the Nobel Prize, with the German originals and English translations of varying quality – apart from her verse play, Eli, which is presented entirely in English. I have to say that I was blown away. Her poetry is an unrelenting emotional reaction to the Holocaust – the chimneys of the book’s title are the chimneys of the crematoria of genocide. She cycles between grief, despair, bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, but surprisingly little anger (though it is not completely absent). The play Eli ends with divine revenge, but we know that doesn’t happen in real life. It was an extraordinary reading experience.

Second poem of third section (title is the first line):

Einen Akkord spielen Ebbe und Flut,
Jäger und Gejagtes.
Mit vielen Händen wird Greifen und Befestigung versucht,
Blut ist der Faden.

Finger weisen Aufstellungen,
Körperteile werden eingesetzt
in sterbende Zeichnungen.

Strategie,
Geruch des Leidens –

Glieder auf dem Wege zum Staub
und die Gischt der Sehnsucht über den Wassern.

My translation:

Ebb and flow play a single chord,
hunter and hunted.
Many hands fumble to grasp and seize,
blood is the thread.

Fingers point to alignments,
body parts are positioned
in dying drawings.

Strategy,
the smell of suffering –

limbs on their way to dust
and the froth of desire on the waters.

I’m going to justify some of my choices here. The original doesn’t have the word “single” in the first line, but I think it’s necessary in translation to catch the emphasis on the object of the sentence, “Einen Akkord”. My “fumble” is a little stronger than “wird versucht”, but “try” and “attempt” sounded clumsy. I felt that “Aufstellungen” and “eingesetzt” are linked, so went for “alignments” and “positioned” rather than the more obvious translations. “Geruch” could have been “stench” or “scent”, but I felt “smell” was neutral enough. My “froth of desire” may be a bit spicier than “die Gischt der Sehnsucht” but I wanted to catch the corporeality. All that said, I am not a professional translator and my German is not what it once was.

This was an unexpectedly impressive discovery in my sequence of Nobel winners who were not white men. Next up is Yasunari Kawabata and his novel Snow Country.