Flight and Metamorphosis: Poems: A Bilingual Edition

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 are the first in more than half a century to elucidate Sachs’s enduring poetic power and relevance.

• Author
• Nelly Sachs

• Format
• hardcover

• Pages
• 208

• Publisher
• Farrar

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 978-0-374-15708-1

• EAN
• 9780374157081

• Release date
• 2021