Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition
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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.
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Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a dramatist and poet. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin, she was forced to flee Germany with her mother in 1940 and escaped to Sweden, where she worked as a translator. Her collections of poetry include In the Habitations of Death, Eclipse of Stars, and And No One Knows Where to Go. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.
Joshua Weiner is a poet and translator. His books include Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees? and The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, and, as editor, At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn. From 1997 to 2021 he served as the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Washington, DC.
