Glowing enigmas by Nelly Sachs and translated by Michael Hamburger

This is poetry from Germany.

Glowing enigmas by Nelly Sachs translated by Michael Hamburger is published by Tavern Books. This is a Book originally written in German. This was published in 2013.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781935635222E12.

Glowing enigmas, by Nelly Sachs and translated by Michael Hamburger from German, brings German poetry into English through Nelly Sachs’s luminous enigma, Holocaust witness, and mystical intensity under enormous historical pressure. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem begins making its own weather. I would read it for light, ash, exile, and the dark holiness of language after catastrophe, not as a fixed lesson about a nation, period, or school. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Glowing enigmas belongs in the translated poetry library because it belongs as a central German-language work of twentieth-century witness.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.