Nelly Sachs

   
‘Flight and Metamorphosis’

By Nelly Sachs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

First published in 1959, Nelly Sachs’s “Flucht und Verwandlung” has been bought back to life in a fresh translation by Joshua Weiner (with Linda B. Parshall). Sachs, a Jewish writer who fled the Holocaust to Sweden in 1940, wrote compressed, spiritually intense poems composed in short, tentative lines that quiver with solemnity and anxiety. Reading them, you feel like you are being enticed toward an encounter with some unknown divinity, then left trembling on the verge: “For there’s no refuge / to be found / in the flying dust / and only the windscarf / a movable crown / signals, still flickering, / blazoned with restless stars / the course of the world—”