Four poems from Flight and Metamorphosis Nelly Sachs (bio) Translated by Joshua Weiner (bio) and Linda B. Parshall (bio) Four poems from Flight and Metamorphosis And everywherethe human in the sunthrowing the black bloodletting, guiltonto the sand—and only in sleepthe hiding place with no tearswith the blazing arrow of homesicknessflying from the skin's quiver— Here, though,just lettersthat scratch the eyebut already long ago becameuseless wisdom teeth,remains of an age gone numb. But nowthe weather-cherubtiesthe four-winds scarfnot to pick strawberriesin the forests of speechbut ratherto blow the trumpet one way, then anotherin the darkness for there's no refugeto be foundin the flying dustand only the windscarfa moveable crownsignals, still flickering,blazoned with restless starsthe course of the world— [End Page 189] Furtherfurtherthrough the smoking visionof scorched miles of loveleading down to the seagrowling, chewing upthe ring of its horizon— Furtherfurtherdown to the black team of horseswith the sun's head in the chariotthat mounts the white wallsthrough the barbed wire of timeand sinks into the prisoner's eyewet with blood—until finallyfurtherfurtherwith sleep as his brotherhe runs into the great freedom— Already the dream has caught himin the star-closed circle … [End Page 190] The sleepwalkercircling on his starawakensto the dawn's white feather—the blood stain there reminding him—he lets the moondrop, appalled—the snowberry burstson the night's black agate—dreamstained— No pure white on earth— [End Page 191] Turned awayI wait for youwho linger, far from the livingor near. Turned awayI wait for yousince those who've been freedcannot be capturedby coils of longingor crownedwith the crown of planetary dust— love is a plant in desert sandsit serves in fireand is not consumed— Turned awayit waits for you— [End Page 192] ________ TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION: The Jewish-German (naturalized Swedish) poet Nelly Sachs was born in 1891, in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, to a bourgeois and assimilated family. Frail of health and sheltered for much of her childhood, Sachs wrote poems and stories that show the deep influence of German Romanticism, an influence she would later distill and refract through more modernist techniques and perspectives into some of the first powerful responses to the Holocaust in poetry, poems in which she discovered her mature voice as a poet and made her reputation. As a young woman she absorbed at some remove the fin-desiècle atmosphere around the Stefan George circle, her poetry and prose appearing in local newspapers including, after the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, Jewish community publications; her marionette plays from this time also found modest production. Sachs never really took much part in the Berlin literary scene around figures such as Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht, but lived in the familiar margin, like most writers, of being both known and unknown. The story of her narrow escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden in 1940 with the help of close friends in Berlin; the last minute aid of powerful friends from afar (such as the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, also an influence on her early writing); and even a sympathetic police officer who told her to avoid the trains, reads like a forties Hollywood script. The reception of the poems she wrote in the forties, in which she takes on the personae and speaks through voices of the Shoah's murdered Jews, has a history complicated by the politics of reconciliation (between Jews and Germans) after World War II, East Germany being more receptive than West to grappling with the immediate crimes of the Nazi state; these have also become, paradoxically, the poems most readers know, and the most widely anthologized in English translation. But such poems don't define the force of Sachs's oeuvre. A poet whose voice was forged in the Holocaust, she is not a "Holocaust poet...