Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition

By Nelly Sachs

Book Overview

This central collection by the poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs--newly translated from the German by Joshua Weiner (with Linda B. Parshall)--reveals the visionary poet's remarkable power of creation and transformation

So far out, in the open,
cushioned in sleep.
In flight from the land
with love's heavy luggage.

A butterfly-zone of dreams
like an open parasol
held up against the truth.

Flight and Metamorphosis marks the culmination of Nelly Sachs's development as a poet. Sachs, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, speaks from her own condition as a refugee from Nazi Germany--her loneliness while living in a small Stockholm flat with her elderly mother; her exile, her alienation, her feelings of romantic bereavement; and her search for the divine. Forced onto a journey of endless change, Sachs created her own path forward.

From these sublime poems, she emerges as a visionary, one who harnesses language's essential power to create and transform our world. Joshua Weiner's translations (with Linda B. Parshall) are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs's enduring poetic power and relevance.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374157081
• ISBN13: 9780374157081
• Release Date: March 2022
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 9.1"