Anthology: In 1945, after the Nazi regime had brought destruction upon itself and its cities, women of all ages, so-called "rubble women", emerged from the ruins to tidy up and start anew.
They were the practical ones, who, as in Wislawa Szymborska's loving and ironic comment on the resilience of the human spirit and the brevity of people's memories, appear after every war to "shove the rubble to the roadsides". Clearing away and reconstructing, however, Szymborska wryly observes, leave little time for retrospection; on the contrary, people tend to grow impatient with those who keep raking up the past.
On the surface the nine poets in this collection have little in common with the intrepid "rubble women". Their lives could not simply be rebuilt after the war. Hitler's rise to power had culminated in the abrupt termination of everything they had known. With the exception of Ingeborg Bachmann and Marie Luise Kaschnitz, they came from assimilated middle-class Jewish families who celebrated the feast days of both religions and took the rich Jewish and Christian cultural and intellectual heritage for granted. Often it was the shock of the racial laws which jolted them into an awareness of what it meant to be an Untermensch in the Third Reich. The writer, Jean Améry, reported: "From this moment on being a Jew signified being a dead person on probation, fair game, someone who by some fluke had not yet quite ended up where by rights he should have been." Yet they continued writing in the language which had been so cruelly turned against them. While fleeing Germany and in the isolation of exile, they clung to Germany as their spiritual and real home. Many of their poems attest to this. They wrote "in the shadow of war", as Eavan Boland says in her introduction, and after 1945 increasingly "because of Auschwitz" (Peter Szondi), long before the ugly phrase "holocaust industry" ever gained currency. Their poetic work constitutes a requiem for a vanished world of culture and grace, a powerful lament, often difficult, fractured and straining towards the margins of language, while searching for a way to express the horror of a time that gave birth to the abomination of Auschwitz.
What Hans Magnus Enzensberger said about Nelly Sachs is true of all: theirs was a poetry of salvage. Their language yielded no words for hatred or revenge, speaking instead of those who suffered - the victims. That was what made it so mysteriously pure and unassailable. Arising out of a need to bear witness, to mourn the dead and fight the collective amnesia that had taken hold in the aftermath to the war, their search for truthful language became a work of rescue from the wreckage of defiled speech. "Someone had to speak up," Nelly Sachs wrote in a letter. "Death was my master. How could I have thought of anything else. My metaphors are my wounds." Her encounter with the Gestapo shortly before her escape to Sweden had struck her mute for a week. "My voice had fled to the fishes", she was to write later. From then on the fish with torn and bloodied gills became her symbol for the martyrdom of the Jews, which, she said, had separated them from all previous meaning by a deep chasm nothing could bridge. "What are we to do," she asked, "impoverished as we are? We must express it, we must cross the chasm."
The Jewish poets in Germany had represented a rare synthesis which brought about a brief and extraordinarily rich flowering. But there was to be no continuum. They were irreplaceable and never replaced. Their work is incomparable and final, just as the Shoah was incomparable and final.
In her introduction Eavan Boland draws a parallel between the devastation caused by the violence in Northern Ireland and the war years in Germany. I find this rather problematic. No one in Northern Ireland was robbed of their humanity and taken to a death factory in the name of an insane racial theory. The poets who came to prominence during the Troubles were respected public figures, listened to and loved. The Jewish poets in this book, on the other hand, added their voice to the chorus of the damned which rises from the darkest recesses of human history and is rarely listened to and even less frequently loved. The silence towards which their absolute verse tends has almost swallowed them.
Apart from Gertrud Kolmar, who perished in a death camp - probably Auschwitz - in 1943, the poets living in exile made tentative attempts to return after the war. Rose Ausländer restlessly travelled from Europe to the US and back until she retreated to a Jewish old age home in Düsseldorf, where she spent her last 20 years confined to her room. Nelly Sachs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1967, left her refuge in Sweden rarely and with great fear to travel to Germany to accept literary honours. Her mental condition had been fragile and each time she suffered a violent breakdown. Else Lasker-Schüler died lonely and isolated in Jerusalem in 1945. Elisabeth Langgässer, who had withdrawn into an "inner exile", died in 1950 from multiple sclerosis, which may have been exacerbated by the terrible moral choices she had had to make. Marie Luise Kaschnitz, who had been silent from 1933 to 1945, played an important role in the post-war pacifist movement. Ingeborg Bachmann lived almost exclusively in Rome, where she died in a fire in 1972. Only Hilde Domin successfully returned to Germany after what she called her "language odyssey", and she and Dagmar Nick are considered to be among the most important poets writing in German today. It is to Boland's credit that she has brought these major poets together in one volume, although I couldn't help wishing for more from Hilde Domin and especially Gertrud Kolmar, whose one poem in the book is not representative of her best work. Her passionate 'We Jews', or 'Obituary', surely the saddest ever written, might have been a more appropriate choice, or, by Nelly Sachs, 'Chorus of the Saved' perhaps or 'Oh, the Weeping Children's Night'.
But these are minor complaints. It is far more serious that this book should be marred by dozens of spelling errors in the German originals as well as by numerous mistranslations, so many, in fact, that I lost count. It is an example of the most careless editing I have ever come across. For instance: Langgässer's collection, Der Wendekreis des Lammes (The Tropic of the Lamb), has become The Turning Circle of the Lambs; Tierkreisgedichte (Zodiac Poems) is given as Animal Circle Poems; while Dagmar Nick's collection title, In the Ellipses of the Moon, is translated as In the Eclipse of the Moon. The mistranslations within the poems are even worse because they distort the meaning. Just one example from many: In Ingeborg Bachmann's beautiful love poem, 'Dunkles zu sagen' ('To speak of dark things'), the word lager is translated as "camp", i.e. your camp was still wet with dew. Lager, which derives from liegen, to lie, refers in this context simply to the place where the beloved slept. The first two lines of the last stanza, "Aber wie Orpheus weiss ich/ auf der Seite des Todes das Leben", are wrongly translated as "But I am like Orpheus and I know/ life on the strings of death", instead of "life on the side of death". Bachmann had been playing with the homophones Saite=string and Seite=side. In her introduction, Boland says she does not speak German, and for that reason alone the editors at Princeton University Press should have been doubly vigilant. Rather than billing the book as "Translations from the German", it might have been more appropriate to call it "Versions from the German".
On the upside, the book gives some good biographical notes on the individual poets, a list for further reading and an index of works by and on these poets. Hopefully, interested readers will go on to other publications for a deeper understanding of their extraordinary work.
Eva Bourke is a poet and translator. Her next collection, The Latitude of Naples, is due in February
After Every War: Twentieth Century Women Poets :Translations from the German by Eavan Boland Princeton University Press, 184pp. £12.95