A Bilingual Edition translated by Joshua Weiner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, hardcover)
Publication Date: March 15, 2022
Publisher Marketing: This central collection by the poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs--newly translated from the German by Joshua Weiner (with Linda B. Parshall)--reveals the visionary poet's remarkable power of creation and transformation.
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 are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs's enduring poetic power and relevance.
