The brilliant German-Jewish poet you have probably never heard of

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O the chimneys!

for the dust of Jeremiah and Job –

Who dreamed you up and built stone upon stone

The path of smoke for their flight?

O dwellings of death

Set out so enticingly

For the host of the house, who used to be the guest

Paths of freedom

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Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) is the German poet who, perhaps more than any other, voiced the lived experience of the Holocaust. Her single most renowned poem, O the chimneys! (1947) has become her signature, composed in a meta-language attentive to Chasidic and kabbalistic mysticism.

She is not as well known as she ought to be but last month the translator Andrew Shanks received the eighth Warwick Prize for Women Writers in Translation on behalf of both himself and Sachs. Revelation Freshly Erupting (published by Carcanet Press) includes all the lyric poetry published during Sachs’ lifetime, together with a collection of posthumous writing, an introductory essay and notes. It offers an effective catalogue raisonnée of Sachs’ life’s work.

Sachs was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, with dreams of becoming a dancer – and, for a time, a watercolour artist. Yet her formal education ended with her schooling. By nature shy and introverted, she decided to dedicated herself to becoming a poet and playwright. In 1940 she fled Germany and escaped to Sweden with her mother, where her friend and fellow author Selma Lagerlof assisted her to settle. There she earned a living as a Swedish-German translator and continued writing poetry.

It was after the death of her mother in 1950 that Sachs’ lifelong depressions coalesced into longer periods of “persecution paranoia” for which she was intermittently hospitalised between 1959 and 1962. Yet, even when it was hardest to write, she maintained a lasting and important correspondence with fellow poet Paul Celan alongside new-generation German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Her earlier collections of poetry include the key works In the Habitations of Death, Eclipse of Stars, and And No One Knows Where to Go. Even so, from her first publication in 1946 onwards through the next 40 years, her work shows a remarkable continuity of purpose. As Enzensberger once commented: “She has fundamentally been writing but a single book.”

In 1966, she was the first German woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (shared with Shmuel Yosef Agnon). As Sachs devoted her writing to commemorating the Holocaust, engaging with biblical and contemporary visions, so Shanks has dedicated the past 40 years to translating Sachs’ oeuvre into the world’s most spoken language. His devotion is the more exceptional since there are already a number of respected English translations. Perhaps even more unexpected is that Shanks’s career has been that of a vicar; an author of books on theological philosophy; and a canon theologian at Manchester Cathedral. Somehow the act of creating poetry in translation transcends and melds his formation in the Church of England with Sachs’ respect for Hebraic biblical tradition.

You can perhaps feel the latter most potently in O The Chimneys!, which deftly contrasts realistic images with religious ones. There are quotations from the Book of Job, while the chimneys change to become “freedom ways for Jeremiah and Job’s dust”,  a counter design to the maliciously “devised habitations of death”. But there is no false claim of redemption:

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When Israel’s body drifted as smoke

Through the air—

Was welcomed by a star …

[That] star turned black.”

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The last lines of the poem address the images again to commemorate and lament the brutal facts of extermination:

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“O you chimneys

O you fingers

And Israel’s body as smoke through the air!

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We should be thankful the Warwick Prize has brought the work of Nelly Sachs once more to our attention.