Glowing Enigmas
by Nelly Sachs

Reviewed by Richard Adams

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Published: September 18, 2014

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When Nelly Sachs received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966, a member of the Swedish Academy delivered the following praise:

It is through your mother tongue that your work reflects a historical drama in which you have participated. Your lyrical and dramatic writing now belongs to the great laments of literature, but the feeling of mourning which inspired you is free from hate and lends sublimity to the suffering of man. We honour you today as the bearer of a message of solace to all those who despair of the fate of man.

While this description of an oeuvre of lament ending in solace does accurately capture much of Sachs’s poetry, it misses the mark when we pick up Glowing Enigmas. Dominated by neither condemnation nor solace, Glowing Enigmas explores the full range of human experience, from rapture to misery. Michael Hamburger’s translation makes this powerful collection of poems available in its entirety for the first time to an English speaking audience.

Nelly Sachs (1891-1970) was born in Berlin into a wealthy family, fled to Sweden in 1940, and lived out her life there as a poet, playwright and translator. Although she was active in literary circles throughout her life, she only found success after leaving Germany, and then as a voice for the Jewish people. Her poetry gradually evolved from the romantic lyricism of her early works to the dense, symbolic style, rife with Jewish imagery and references, of her later works.

Glowing Enigmas was conceived in the long shadow of the Holocaust. We often refer to this genocide as “unspeakable,”but we do speak of it. It would be more accurate to say that it and other human tragedies are unfathomable. Words are insufficient; explanations evade us; our collective grief endures. Sachs’s words explore this unfathomable with a relentless urgency, though its engagement is more expressionistic than diagnostic or therapeutic.

This English language publication of Glowing Enigmas is so crucialbecause her voice has been long sidelined, especially in the English-speaking world. Her works were too often undervalued in a postwar Germany that worshiped the dry, cynical, intellectualism of Benn, Böll, and Grass. In addition, even as she reached the peak of her success, she was three times a second-class citizen: a Jew, an emigrant, and a woman. Lastly, though Sachs was of course a spokeswoman for the Jewish people and their suffering, the labeling of her poems as “Holocaust Literature”obscured her broader engagement with human suffering.

This othering compounded what would have already been a struggle for acceptance in postwar Germany. Sachs’s poetry generally, and Glowing Enigmas inparticular, is the antithesis of the “Zero Hour”ethos of modern Germany. The post-war period was a time of active forgetting: denazification, rebuilding infrastructure and artistic revival were all done with the loudly proclaimed “Stunde null”(“zero hour”–literally, midnight on May 8, 1945, when the capitulation of the Nazi forces' commenced the postwar period.) as their foundation. In contrast, Sachs’s poetry cannot forget–refuses to forget. Her poems examine every incarnation of human suffering, struggle to fathom history’s enigmatic horrors.

The collection weaves through a number of styles, perspectives and themes. Remembrance is perhaps the key theme that runs through all four books, but its appearance and function constantly changes. At times the text proceeds deliberately and carefully, seeking out both past and future:

So deep I traveled down

beyond my birth

till I met early death

that sent me back again

into this singing pyramid

to survey the inflamed

realm of silence

and whitely I crave you

death—be no stepfather to me now—

In other poems time is the antagonist, using memory as a weapon to hasten death:

Faster time faster

when the second second forces the first to its knees

the golden army all day long on the march

in haste

till at evening all have been beaten

a rosemary bush the sky

night washes death down to its primal color

the elements sick with nostalgia break loose

run to the sea

grow breathless

refuse to blossom

for another has died

who took time’s measure—

Across all of its registers and points of view, however, the individual, solitary experience of remembrance –both personal and collective –remains central. Glowing Enigmas is free of dialogue and direct address. It’s text is thought and feeling as known, remembered, guessed.

Sachs’s poems are saturated with forceful emotion, but her words do not always admit a clear definition. This combination –intense, immediate emotionality, expressed via untrustworthy signifiers –brings the reader into a pact with Sachs’s, one that insists on vivid engagement. Hamburger’s translation is unburdened with unnecessary idioms or accommodations to English language readers. At times the result is awkward, but so it is in the original. Sachs has chosen her words carefully and they proceed on the page with a tangible deliberateness–unintuitively juxtaposing images and concepts that the reader must struggle to reconcile.

When Hamburger interprets too much for my taste, his words tend to make the language more genteel.

I saw him step from the house

the fire had singed

but not burned him

He carried a briefcase of sleep

under one arm

heavy inside with letters and figures

a whole arithmetic—

Into his arm was branded:

7337 the ruling number

These numbers had conspired among themselves

For example, in the lines, “I saw him step from the house/ the fire had singed/ but not burned him,”Hamburger’s choice of singed might have better been rendered as scorched, and burned could have been amended to consumed. While this is perhaps a less elegant solution, it conveys the original with greater force.

Hamburger’s translation effectively negotiates the competing demands of accessibility and fidelity to the original. Crucially, Hamburger does not take it upon himself to explain everything he renders. Instead, he opens a door, but leaves us to walk through it alone. The following poem is a particularly effective example of Hamburger’s translation style:

Already your being’s paradigm

has grown into your beyond

long yearned for distantly

in that place where smiling and weeping

become foundlings in the invisible

the images of vision given away to what’s higher—

 

But you pressed down the keys

into their graves of music

and dance the lost meteor

invented a wing for your anguish

 

the two lines of beginning and end

singing drew closer in space—

This poem contains a number of themes that repeat throughout the collection: intense longing, the unknowable, the intertwining of past and future. The translation here retains Sachs’s stream-of-consciousness style while still making the individual words and constructions feel natural to English readers. This retains the thematic elements and captures the ineffable quality of Sachs’s imagery. We see this both in moments of literal translation –“dance the lost meteor/ invented a wing for your anguish”– and in more subtle accounting for English inflections and syntax –“your being’s paradigm/ has grown into your beyond/ long yearned for distantly.”

Hamburger’s negotiation of Sachs’s ambiguity illuminates the enigmas but leaves the interpretation up to us. We may not find answers, at times even the questions may remain unclear. But in the act of searching, the parsing of memory from illusion and desire, we find catharsis.

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