Poetry The Seeker

399 pp., $12.50

NELLY SACHS was a relative unknown in America when she was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. Her poems were written in German, for the most part, and the first comprehensive English edition of her work appeared in 1967. O the Chimneys, published that year, represented about half of her total output. This new volume. The Seeker and Other Poems, completes the translation of her work into English.

Michael Hamburger and Ruth and Matthew Mead, the translators of this collection, have set their versions on facing pages with the German originals. This is really the only appropriate way to publish a translation, since translations must, by their nature, somewhat distort the meaning of the original. Sachs' German is simple enough that a translator need not do it major damage, but it is still useful to watch exactly how the process of rendering it into English is going on.

Nelly Sachs, who died last year, was a poet who spoke with quiet fury of the agony of the Jewish people. Her lines are incredibly plain, her images simple, and her feeling clear. She has an incredibly small vocabulary, and a few words recur throughout her poems- Staub, Wiiste, Adern, Mond, abgerissen, Tod- dust, desert, veins, moon, death, torn apart. Each word is used to create a similar mood, to conjure up images of the horrors which the nation of Israel has seen. The quality of her poetry is wildly uneven, some of it as sublime as Rilke, some of it unsuccessful for its excessive simplicity.

"The Seeker" ("Die Suchende") is a poem of die Leidbseessene, the "woman possessed by sorrow," who serves as a metaphor for the nation of Israel. On first reading, it seems just too simple to be really good, but the subtlety of the poem only emerges after several exposures. The translation is almost totally literal, and thus loses some of the devices which make the original succeed. An effective alliteration ("die Wande der Wiiste wissen von Liebe") is lost in translation as "the walls of the desert know of love." The strict rendering into unwieldy English detracts immeasurably from the starkness of the German. Words which can be used in German poetry, like Gestirne, or Jahrtausend, are rendered in unwieldy English words- constellation or millenium. In fact, the English translation is not really poetry at all, merely a guide to the sense of the original.

If the language of the poems, and their images, keep recurring, it is only because the basic theme of Nelly Sachs's poetry was unchanging. She is a poet of suffering, not of joy, one whose only experience in life is agony, and who expresses it in her poetry, attempting to sum up the sufferings of her nation in print. The theme is unwavering, although explored in every possible detail.

THE SHORTER poems in this volume vary widely in quality. Unfortunately, the translation does not mirror the variation in the poems, since it is always uniform, unchanging, unexpressive. Occasionally, Sachs writes brief, epigram-like statements of a few lines, none of which seem to succeed very well. One such is "Iich sah eine Stelle," which the translators render, transposing the first two lines, as "I found a hat a man had worn/Saw where a stove had stood/What sand, O my beloved, /Knows of your blood?" Neither the English nor the German is very memorable, no matter how deeply felt.

Her longer poems are better, however. "Die Stunde zu Endor," "The Hour at Endor," is a long, rambling plaintive piece, filled with biblical allusions and curiously moving. Her series of "Choruses" sums up the spirit of longing and sorrow which is the backbone of her whole poetic work, and most of the poems display the marvelous strength of her use of the language.

Translation, admittedly, is difficult, and any translator must choose between two options. Either he will give a literal rendering, or he will attempt to make his work art in its own right, in his own language. The translators of this book have chosen the former course, with the result that their renderings can be read with academic interest, but not as literature. Nonetheless, the publishers have done a great service by bringing out a complete edition of Nelly Sachs in America for the first time.