In addition to the early studies, I think Nelly Sachs's work can be called a song of escape or a variant of song on the run. His song of escape begins with In the Abode of Death (1947): "Who designed you and built stone by stone / This paved road for fugitives in the smoke"; Her memories of escape echoed in her final poem, "Crack, Night" (1971), published after her death: "Now you have let your fugitive baggage pass".
Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) was a German-Jewish poet and playwright. Born in Berlin, Germany in 1891, he fled to Sweden in 1940 to escape the Nazi Party's persecution of Jews in Germany. In 1966, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding lyrical and dramatic works that interpret the fate of the Jewish people with the power to touch the heart." He died on May 12, 1970 in Stockholm, Sweden, at the age of seventy-nine. Nelly Sachs, pictured in 1910.
Sacks did experience an escape, but she was lucky, especially compared to those who did not escape death. This may be because she was enthusiastically rescued by the Swedish writer Lagerlöf and others. "In the spring of 1940, after several months of hard work, we arrived in Stockholm." This is her summary of her escape in her acceptance speech when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, in an inexact "few months" and in a situation of "hardship", and "we" refer to her and her mother, whose father died in 1930. In my opinion, "months of hard work" can be considered as a general note on the song of escape.
The Weight of the Butterfly: Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs, by Nelly Sacks, translated by Chen Li and Zhang Fenling, Yazhong Culture CITIC Publishing Group, May 2022
Writing after overcoming fear
The first thing to note about Sacks' runaway songs is the question of when they were created. She fled at the beginning of World War II, and her song of escape was first published in 1947, two years after World War II. In other words, the seven years elapsed between her escape and her writing about her escape, which is enough time to forget a lot of the past, especially the details of the past. But judging by Sachs's escape song, everything is alive, and there is nowhere for oblivion.
The question is not why it is remembered so clearly after so long, but how Sachs broke through the silence. In April 1933, the Nazi government banned Jewish business, leading to a nationwide anti-Jewish campaign. Sacks entered a lull in poetry with "great fear". In this regard, the birth of the song of the runaway meant that she overcame "great fears" and thus contributed to the resumption of her poetic creation. One of the key figures was her mother, who fled with her. "During the years of caring for my mother, the victims of the Holocaust haunted the conversations, memories, dreams and nightmares of the two of them." Memories, dreams, and nightmares are all personal experiences, but they can also be the content of conversation. In a sense, conversation is about making what happened happen again, from what happened in reality to happening in language. The conversation with his mother is undoubtedly one of the triggers for the song of escape, and Saxophone should have completed the transition from talking to writing.
"The persecutor and the persecuted"
In my opinion, the masterpiece of the Saxophone's song of escape is "The Persecuted Will Not Be the Persecutor", from his collection of poems "The Darkness of the Constellation" (1949). The poem distills the extremely ordinary but thrilling sound of footsteps, which is the core image of the saxophone escape song. In this poem, it may be the footsteps of the fugitive, the footsteps of the pursuer, the footsteps of the persecuted, or the footsteps of the persecutor. Life and death depend on the contest of these two footsteps, to see who is one step faster:
Footsteps -
Executioners and victims,
persecutors and persecuted,
The ancient game of hunter and prey -
As the poem writes, the general fact is that "the steps of the executioner overshadow the footsteps of the innocent" and that "flight is destroyed in the blood of the fugitive". These are unfortunate fugitives compared to the Sacks. And this poem is an elegy written by lucky escapees for unfortunate escapees. In fact, Sachs' Song of Escape is more of this song of failure to escape death, and for that matter, Song of Death is a variant of Song of Escape. Among them, "Embraced by the Comforting Hand of Heaven" and "Gloren Death" are particularly shocking.
Ten years later, Sachs published a collection of poems, Escape and Metamorphosis (1959), still devoted to the theme of fugitive: "Oh, darkness / Build your embassy / For a moment: / Rest in flight." Here, the poet prays that darkness will become the embassy of the fugitives, that they will have a temporary break on the way. Twenty years later, the fugitive wrote such well-intentioned sentences, and it is not difficult to appreciate what she said about her escape: "months of hardship." In fact, the masterpiece in this collection of poems is "Fugitive", which she read at the Nobel Prize for Literature winning the scene: "Fleeing, / What a grand reception / is going on-" The award ceremony became another "what a grand reception".
In 1966, Nelly Sacks won the Nobel Prize.
Lyricism reinforces the experience of escape
Sacks is clearly a lyric poet, and lyricism reinforces her fugitive experiences and traumatic themes. For her, writing poetry is very close to singing. Her poems are singing and weeping. Its distinguishing mark is the frequent use of the interjection "oh". For example, in "Oh, Chimney", the interjection "Oh" is used in each stanza, and the sound of this exclamation has an extraordinary power to wedge deeper into the poet's lamentation. The objects of exclamation in the poem include "chimney", "dwelling of death", "you fingers", "and the flesh of Israel floating in the air like smoke", connecting the objects of the "oh" word lamentation, almost a history of blood and tears of Jewish persecution: "chimney" is part of the crematorium, "dwelling of death" is its metaphor, both of which point to the persecuted object from both the virtual and real levels, "you fingers" correspond to the construction of the crematorium, belonging to the persecutor, "the flesh of Israel floating in the air like smoke" They are persecuted, or those who have attempted to flee.
Another key word for the lyricism of Saxophone's Run Song is "chorus." In the Abode of Death, there are several poems under the name "chorus": "Chorus of the Rescued", "Choral of Shadows", "Choral of Stones", "Choral of Clouds", "Choral of the Comforter", "Choral of the Unborn". The pronouns used in these works are all "we", which has a distinctive character of collective lyricism. In other words, these works do not express the personal feelings of the saxophone, but the national feelings of all the fugitives and persecuted. Since Sacks is one of them, this means that such works are not endorsements, but a union of "individual me" and "group self", so these poems are called "choruses". Of these "choruses", the one that impressed me the most was "Chorus of the Rescued", and Saxophone himself was such a rescued person. It is worth noting the poem's requesting tone:
We, the rescued,
Request that you:
Show us your sun, but please take your time.
Step by step guide us through the stars.
When teaching us to relearn our lives, be gentle.
So as not to sing birds,
Or barrels filled with well water,
It will make our poorly healed pain fall apart again...
What is shown here is the true inner world of the rescued, on the one hand, they are lucky rescued, on the other hand, they are vulnerable survivors, who almost need to complete a resurrection and "relearn life". The significance of the poem is that it reveals to the reader the unknown and incurable inner wounds of the rescued. In this sense, it is only the body that is rescued at this time, and it is also necessary to repair the soul frightened by death in the body, completely dispel the fear of death and the shadow of death in the heart of the rescued, "the worm of fear still feeds on us", "the rope around the neck still swings / in the blue air before our eyes", which dooms salvation to be a long process, which is accompanied by the slow recovery of the soul and the reunion of spirit and flesh.
Nelly Sachs.
Prayer for the past
The tone of request does not appear only in the poem of Sachs, but has a certain universality. The tone of the request is essentially a human good, out of correction of the evil of the times. Especially considering the long interval between Sachs's escape experience and escape writing, it is better to appreciate Sachs' subjective transformation of past reality. She has a set of poems "Prayers for the Dead Groom", and it can be said that praying for the dead is the main feature of saxophone's poetry. Prayers are generally oriented to the future, while Sax's prayers are oriented to the past, and in the writing of the deceased, Saxophone incorporates a strong emotional will, thus writing them as hymns. The verse "Prayer for the Dead Bridegroom" is like a companion to the Song of Solomon of the Bible:
Your eyes, oh my love,
It's the eyes of a doe,
Has long rainbow-like pupils...
Oh, a pair of eyes that have been extinguished,
Your psychic vision has fallen
In the golden dream of the Lord,
Among them, we know only dreams.
This is the last poem in the group, "Your eyes, oh my love". Sachs, who was in Sweden, learned that the man he loved had died in a concentration camp in 1943 and was motivated to recreate it, calling him "the dead groom" in the poem. It can be said that the "dead groom" was one of the many victims, but in Sacks' heart, his status was extraordinary, and Sacks was said to have never married for him.
Sacks' poetry focuses on the trauma of flight and racial persecution, and the style is mainly lyrical, which focuses on the depth of expression, which strengthens the appeal of the poem, but also makes it relatively narrow and monotonous, especially compared to her friend Paul Céran. Also a Jewish poet, Celan, has Death Fugue, and Sacks's poems seem to be missing this classic. A kind explanation is that Celan's parents died tragically in the camp, while Sachs's parents were able to die, and Celan's personal trauma is obviously even deeper. But this is only an external explanation, because writing requires poetry skills in addition to real experience. In terms of the overall achievement and influence of poetry, Celand clearly surpassed Sachs, and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, not Celan, is likely related to Sachs' flight to Sweden, at least the near water floor helped her achieve this unexpected glory.
Author/Cheng Yiyi
Editor/Zhang Jin
Proofreader/Zhao Lin