On Translating Rose Ausländer

I first encountered Rose Ausländer in a footnote of John Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. In the text there’s a quote downplaying Ausländer’s connection to Celan’s “Todesfuge/Deathfugue” (which he wrote around 1944) and Celan’s inheritance of Ausländer’s image “Schwarze Milch/black milk” in his poem. However, in the index one is led to the biography of Celan by Israel Chalfan, where he quotes a transcript of Ausländer acknowledging and extolling Celan’s use of her image, as they were friends, and she was delighted that “[Celan] has raised [black milk] to the highest level of poetic expression. It has become a part of him.”

The “black milk” image appears in Ausländer’s poem, “Ins Leben/To Life,” which she wrote in 1925 and was the first poem of Ausländer’s that I translated and the first time the poem appeared in English in a publication in the United States (Jewish Currents). From there, I began my years-long endeavor in translating Ausländer’s poems for the first essential selection of her work to be published in the United States, which is forthcoming with Four Way Books.

Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) was a prominent and prolific Jewish, German-language poet and translator, born in what was then Austria and is now known as Czernowitz in Ukraine. Ausländer survived the Shoah by living in hiding in the Jewish ghetto. She is the recipient of several German literary awards, including the Droste-Prize of Meersburg (1967), the Ida-Dehmel-Prize, the Andreas-Gryphius Prize, the Roswitha-Medallion of Bad Gandersheim (1980), and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Art (1984), and is the author of over a dozen books of poetry. Ausländer mostly lived between Eastern Europe, New York City, and Düsseldorf. She died in the Nelly Sachs House in Düsseldorf on January 3, 1988.

Ausländer wrote approximately 3,000 poems during her lifetime, with many draft versions, and even translated her own poems between German and English. Themes that are significant to her work include the Shoah, exile, Judaism, family, language, mother tongue, poetic expression as homeland, love, and aging. The poems “A Day in Exile,” “However,” and “Strangers” draw on the Talmudic legend of the thirty-six righteous people who are simultaneously hidden and revealed, whose identities are not known, who are the Diaspora and therefore scattered, who sustain the world and keep it from darkness and destruction. Through this myth, Ausländer meditates on Holocaust memory and honors those murdered and exiled during the Shoah.