Dark Dreams

O The Chimneys.
by Nelly Sachs.
Translated by Michael Hamburger, Ruth and Matthew Mead, Michael Roloff, and Christine Holme. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 387 pp. $7.50.

Germany, a country whose inhabitants are fond of being called the people of poets and thinkers, has often reserved a “special treatment” of her own for just such men. Consider the fate of Marx and Engels, Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Brecht—all of them barely survived that treatment. Indeed, anyone wishing to pay his respects to Germany's true representatives to the world community would have to visit cemeteries in Paris and London, New York and California, Rio de Janeiro and Switzerland, Sweden and Siberia. Of course, Germany at present is not addicted either to murder or to persecution, but many a German author is now faced with a new danger: he is “welcomed home,” smothered by incense and fraternal kisses. Brecht, for example, whose work has been enthroned as “classic” German literature, has become so thoroughly accepted that the explosive social message of his plays has been completely dissipated. And Nelly Sachs—to take a more recent case in point—has been carried off to a region beyond all critical consideration by having been pronounced the official German poet of atonement, the high priestess of the sorrows and lamentations of the Jewish people. As a result, those who write in German about her work produce nothing but hymns of praise.

What is needed, however, is an appraisal of the specific quality of this lyric poet, whose life ceased at its midpoint to be a German life. Until her forty-eighth year, she was lodged in her father's villa in the best section of Berlin, where she had grown up as a typical daughter of the elite, sheltered from the trials of life. She was exposed to private tutors and to the liberal arts; to an upper-middle-class, emancipated Jewish milieu. Her literary idol was Selma Lagerlof, the splendid Swedish author whom no one could ever suspect of literary ambition. To her, the “luminous model,” Nelly Sachs dedicated the only book she published before 1947, a collection of legends and sagas which appeared in 1921. The motifs of the Christian Middle Ages dominate the book, which talks about the Crusades but not about the misery the Crusades brought to the Jewish people. According to Olaf Lagercranz, the Swedish literary historian, “The entire book is stamped by an emphatically Christian Weltanschauung.” One of the tales, for instance, is called “The Christ Image,” and its lyric stance, its images and metaphors, are determined by the mystique of the Christian Passion and the concept of reconciliation characteristic of Pietism.

Nelly Sachs grew up among the middle classes so classically described by Fontane, those Prussian manufacturers who longed for higher things. The Jews among them tended to be German nationalists and World War I volunteers who had won the Iron Cross; their sentiments were anti-democratic and often anti-republican. Later, they voted for Hindenburg, the hero of the First World War, and with his help they elected their own fate, the end of their existence. Many of them—Nelly Sachs included—did not know what it meant to be Jewish until, finally, they were told.

Suddenly labeled a Jew, Nelly Sachs could no longer remain a disciple of Jacob Böhme, the mystic and pious Christian. Now she had to discover herself as a Jew—a grotesque and almost absurd process for one who was to remain for many years a writer in the German language, a language which wanted no part of her, but to which she remained bound. The language of the murderers continued to be the language of the victim. The work of Nelly Sachs is informed by this dialectic of disaster; she wrests poetry of great beauty from it, but she often succumbs to its tension as well.

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Drawn more to transfiguration than to clarification, given to inner contemplation rather than to rational dispute or any other kind of conflict, Nelly Sachs turned to Hasidism, whose founder, the Baal Shem Tov, permitted comparison with Jesus. Even more important was her reading in the Zohar, which, like the writings of Jacob Böhme, envisions God as a holy nothingness, as silence and eternal night. Olaf Lagercranz has demonstrated the profound influence of this work on her, the weighty justification it provided for her use of language. Thus one chapter of the Zohar—Nelly Sachs possessed a German translation of it—contains a commentary on Genesis which takes the first three words of the Bible, “Bereshit bara Elohim,” to mean not that God created some-thing but that Creation began with the sowing of letters and numbers, the holy seed of the world. The word was first; it created the Deity; it is divine. In this idea Nelly Sachs must have found a kind of salvation: language became a preserver and protector, a home and a refuge for the unprotected, homeless refugee. (She had managed to escape to Sweden in 1940.)

One can find this element of a virtually life-preserving Jewish mysticism, based on the Zohar, in the following poem; even as it denies words the capacity to communicate, it attempts a new creation by means of words, and it gives priority to words over reality:

Nicht mit meinem Munde
der
Erde
Sonne
Frühling
Schweigen
auf der Zunge wachsen lasst
weiss ich das Licht
eures entschwundenen
Alphabetes
zu entzünden.
. . . .
So muss ich denn aufstehen
und diesen Felsen
durchschmerzen
bis ich Staubgeworfene
brautlich Verschleierte
den Seeleneingang fand
wo das immer knospende
Samenkorn
die erste Wunde
ins Geheimnis schlägt.

(Not with my mouth/ which/ grows on its tongue/ earth/ sun/ spring/ silence/ can I manage to kindle/ the light/ of your faded alphabet. . . . So I must arise/ and toil through this rock/ till I, turned to dust,/ veiled as a bride,/ found the entrance to the soul/ where the seed kernel, ever sprouting/ inflicts the first wound/ upon the mystery.)

In fact, the influence of the ancient Jewish religious tradition can be traced in all the work of Nelly Sachs and extends even to matters of detail. Often, indeed, one cannot grasp what she means or the significance of what she says—one cannot surmount the proverbial “difficulty” of her poetry—without going back to the Book of Books. In his study of her work, Jurgen P. Wallmann calls attention to many examples of Nelly Sachs's utilization of the Bible, as can be seen from the following interpretation:

In the poem “Chorus of the Stones” the stones say: “You heads of Jacob,/ For you we hide the roots of dreams/ And let the airy angel's ladders/ Sprout like the tendrils of a bed of bindweed.” The heads of Jacob addressed here are the children of Israel, the progeny of Jacob, whose other name, according to Genesis 32:28 is Israel; for them the stones, which are picked up for the purpose of deadly throws, are the ladders of the angels, which through death, open up the way to God. The image derives from Genesis 28: 10-17, where one is told how Jacob dreams of a celestial ladder on which the angels of the Lord climb up and down, and on whose uppermost rung stands God, who pronounces His blessing upon Jacob and his progeny.

_____________

Similar influences can be discovered in Nelly Sachs's play, The Lost and Saved Again Alphabet. The very title of the play, as well as her comment on it—“The alphabet is the land where the spirit settles and the holy name flowers”—are evidence for her absorption in kabbalistic and pre-kabbalistic doctrines. Moreover, there is much in the play that alludes to Ezekiel, who was ordered by the Lord to eat a scroll of scripture (Ezek. 3), and also to Rabbi Meir, the Talmudic sage, from whom Helmut Geissler quotes the following in his essay on Nelly Sachs:

. . . When I came to Rabbi Ismael he asked me: My son, what is your occupation! I replied to him: I am a (Torah-)scribe. Then he spoke to me: My son, be careful in your work for it is God's work; if you leave out only one letter or inscribe one too many you will destroy the entire world.

Nelly Sachs's writing, then, is impelled by an almost biblical devotion to the primal forces of numbers and letters, to death and resurrection in the word:

. . . Ihr habt euer Alphabet
    erschlagen—
Eure Buchstaben vergessen—
Sintflutertrunken ist euer Wort.

( . . . You have slain your alphabet—/ Forgotten your letters—/ Your word has perished in the Flood.)

At the same time, her writing can frequently be characterized as constricted, eyeless—and endlessly repetitive. The very titles of her books evoke loneliness and darkness—In the Habitations of Death; Eclipse of the Stars; And No One Knows How to Go On; Flight and Metamorphosis; Journey Into a Dustless Realm; Death Still Celebrates Life—and her basic vocabulary resounds in a distinctly minor key: stone and sand, dread and night, dying and death. It is the poetry of a human being who for seven years lived in mortal danger: “Writing was my mute scream.” It is the poetry of a human being who had to learn to live anew in an alien world with an alien language, a human being whose friends were dead and whose love had been murdered. Life was preserved by the word; deeds meant death.

Accordingly, the work of this woman includes no love poetry in the usual sense of that term. In the case of Nelly Sachs, the poetry of love is always the poetry of reminiscence. It consists of solemn speech rather than personal communication; the title of one such poem is “Vainly.” In a strange way, this element of reminiscence can also result in a language of reminiscence, an old language that strikes one as both splendid and purple. Thus, in her “Chorus of the Stars,” the planet Earth is beautified intolerably in an aimless stream of metaphors that express nothing:

We stars, we stars
We wandering, glistening, sing-
    ing dust—
Earth, our sister, has gone blind
Among the constellations of
    heaven—
A scream she has become
Among the singers—
She, richest in longing
Who began her task—to form
    angels—in dust,
She whose secret contains bliss
Like streams bearing gold—
Poured out into the night she lies
Like wine in the streets—
Evil's yellow sulfur lights flicker
    over her body.

O earth, earth
Star of stars
Veined by spoors of homesickness
Begun by God Himself—
Have you no one who remembers
    your youth?
No one who will surrender him-
    self as the swimmer
To the oceans of death?
Has no one's longing ripened
So it will rise like the angelically
    flying seed
Of the dandelion blossom?

Her repeated cries of invocations—“O time, O the hills of dust, O the chimneys, O world, O my children, O the blossoms of dying in the clouds, O the night of the weeping children”—tend to turn into mawkish whines; the force of a lyric formula of entreaty languishes and yields to a poeticized arabesque. Occasionally, the predominant pietistic-metaphysical attitude of forgiving and understanding, of lamentation rather than complaint, changes from a hymn-like tone to one of sentimentality which rings untrue and unconvincing. Thus she writes, “Then she kisses the air-born being and dies”—but why is the child of the insane mother an air-born being?—or “to where tears mean eternity”—but where do tears mean eternity? Her images and metaphors can go so far in prettifying a state of affairs that they turn the bones of murdered children into flutes:

Ear of mankind
overgrown with nettles,
would you hear?
If the voice of the prophets
    blew
on flutes made of murdered chil-
    dren's bones
and exhaled airs burnt with
    martyrs' cries—
if they built a bridge of old men's
    dying
groans—
Ear of mankind
occupied with small sounds,
would you hear?

_____________

Even the dignity and grandeur of Nelly Sachs's more successful poems tend to be disfigured by their vocabulary of pathos, their pompously disjunctive syntax, and by a language which strides on stilts. To be sure, these disturbing mannerisms of solemnity appear a good deal more sober when they are transposed into English idiom—if only because very few of the translations in this volume actually preserve the shape, tone, and music of the originals. For example, ugly and banal idioms such as the German “wissen um” cease to be irritating when rendered as “to know of”; and the pathetic “Demut der Luft” is toned down to “humble air.” Thus, too, when the original has blood being kindled “mit der Sehnsucht Zunge,” the English version simply refers to “its yearning tongues.” Nor is English burdened by such bloated sounds as those involved in the heavy accent of the genitive case; words like des Sandelbaumes must be rendered by the harmless and sober plural: “trees.” In short, the changes necessitated by translation are considerable. A poem like “Bewitched is half of everything,” which in German relies conspicuously on stresses, is perceptibly transformed when “Narbe aus Heimweh” is rendered as “homesickness scar,” and “Engelvergessenes” as “what angels forgot”; when a “Lachmöve” becomes a mere “laughing gull”; and when the grammatically involved “Ausfahrt im Sterben der Rätsel Kometenschweif” is tamed to “The enigmas' trail of comets erupts in death.”

The different effects achieved in the English versions by no means represent a failure on the part of the agile and skillful translators; they are due rather to the fact that American idiom simply does not seem to have at its disposal the romanticizing vocabulary which lets lamentation degenerate into a whine. “Woe tendril” does not match the sentimentality of “We-heranke,” nor “moon colored bones” that of “mondenen Gebeinen”; and “der Schöpfungsvulkane Erstlingsschrei” is not simply the same as “the first cry of the creative volcano.” The specific gravity of the German vocabulary tends to get lost, along with the more distressing ballast of tradition which sometimes turns Nelly Sachs's work into a florid kind of “women's poetry.” One can see this clearly by comparing the poem, “How many oceans have vanished in the sand” with the original German. It is precisely by avoiding verb-forms like “have vanished” that the German succeeds in inducing the emotions of a chorale. Moreover, can one really translate words like “Sang-horn,” or “Todverlassenheit” or “Heimwehfäden”? They are not the same as “singing horn,” “mortal abandonment,” and “threads for longing home.” Then, too, the tenth line of the poem consists of two German words, “Wieviel Heimwehfäden,” and this results in a certain tempo that is an essential ingredient of a lyric poem. In English, however, the phrase is rendered by eight words, so that a different melody is produced, one that does not give rise to the sentimental and all but professional pathos of a romantic joy in singing and songs.

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Nelly sachs has a black theme: the fate of those who were beaten to death, gassed, murdered on an assembly line, stamped to pieces by a gigantically organized machinery of death. But she has frequently managed to use pastels to cover over this theme: “And evening again has the violet-shy word/that only grows so blue in the homeland:/ Good night!” That is frosted foam; it is not the frozen scream of such lines as “When the great terror came/ I—fell dumb/ Fish with its deathly side/ turned upward/ air bubbles paid for the grappling breath.” (It is known that for five days after a Gestapo hearing, Nelly Sachs suffered from paralysis of the larynx.)

Whenever Nelly Sachs has something precise to report; when she is not engaged in weaving veils of words out f fairy tales, sagas, and Christian-Judaic mysticism; when she “narrates” her awesome experience concretely; when, as it were, she is reporting the news from that easily identifiable planet of barbarism—at such times she achieves great poetry. For example there is not one word too many, and not one mawkish sound in a poem like “Old Men,” and there is no shimmering adjectival ornamentation in that almost epic tale of an escape, “Someone Comes,” which describes her linguistic privation as an emigrant:

A stranger always has
his homeland in his arms
like an orphan
for which he may be seeking
nothing but a grave.

Many of the later poems of Nelly Sachs have a great and almost wise chasteness. Thus “Landscape of Screams,” “Oblivion! Skin,” and “Line Like” are of transparent beauty—shy, sparse of words, unyielding and intense. In such poems, the lace of women's clubs is torn to shreds; the brown shirts are no longer purple; the spell of an ingrained German tradition and the pull of a newly chosen but imperfectly assimilated heritage are not, to be sure, suspended but they are overcome. In such poems the mysterious dialectic of art holds sway and Nelly Sachs is no longer the victim; she is, at last, the victor.