Flight and Metamorphosis

Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) is primarily known as a cultural icon, the Jewish exile from Nazi Germany and Nobel laureate whose 1947 poem “O the chimneys!” helped to initiate what we now know as Holocaust poetry. In his translation with Linda B. Parshall, Joshua Weiner chooses a thematically and stylistically unified book, Flight and Metamorphosis (1959), to provide a more complete expression of what new generations of English-language readers will discover to be a great visionary poet. 

Sachs’s work here arises from the incessant change of exile. As she writes in “In flight,”

In place of home
I hold the metamorphoses of the world—

With an abstract, lyrical style, Sachs probes the limits of meaning in a universe where God has contracted “into Himself in order to create the world,” as Weiner describes the Deus absconditus of the Zohar, a foundational work of Jewish mysticism important to Sachs. In “An end” she writes:

An end
but only in a room—
for
what’s looking over my shoulder
is not your face
but 
residing in air
and nothing—
mask from beyond

If Sachs follows the Zohar in making “materiality transparent” through “inner languages,” the obliquity and uncertain referentiality of post-modern poetic practice leads her to widening gyres of ineffability and transcendence, seeking epiphanies that are hallmarks of visionary works. Observe, for example, how “sand,” which represents the children of Israel, swiftly assumes the qualities of something metaphysical:

Between
your eyebrows
is your ancestry
a cipher 
out of the sand’s oblivion.

Weiner’s masterful introduction argues for the expansion of Sachs’s reputation beyond “O the chimneys!” to the multivalent “deep dark” of this book’s Geheimnis (“mystery,” “secret,” and “home” all at once). The timeless lyricism of Flight and Metamorphosis may be what we need as war, atrocity, and exile return to Europe. As Sachs writes in “Saved”:

in the griefwind
in the cold yoke
of stretching limbs
breathe for aeons
and 
like glassblown shapes
bend the vanished form of love

for the mouth of a god—