When I just started writing poetry in 1996, I read Nelly Sachs’ collection of poems “The Escape,” and I was amazed at her purity, which was completely different from the complex, post-modern mix of modernism I was reading at the time.
Her poems are made up of basic elements, that is, like her good friend Celan, the miserliness after death and suffering, is there poetry after Auschwitz? Also, but the so-called “one word with ten thousand words in one’s heart”, the real poetry has become so precious and rare, just like the title of today’s newly translated book by Sax – “The Weight of the Butterfly”, the weight of the butterfly is actually a concentration camp The weight of the light smoke above.
Thanks to the publishers who persist in publishing these anachronistic, bitter almond poems in an age when few people read poetry. Nelly Sachs of Jewish descent, born in Berlin, Germany in 1891, fled to Sweden in 1940 to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany. “The Fate of the Jews” won the Nobel Prize for Literature – she is almost one of the most unpopular poets in the history of the Nobel Literature Prize, and many people even suspect that she won the award because the European literary world made up for the damage caused by anti-Semitism, and I don’t know what the power of her simple, plain ashes poems is.
But as shown in the titled “Butterfly”, when the soul descends through the earth’s core, it is also a heavy, skeletal weight that will be smelted by suffering into a badge of secrets.
”What a lovely afterlife/painted on your dust./You are led through the earth/burning core,/through its stony shell,/the web of fleeting farewells./…/How lovely The afterlife/painted on your remains./What a sign of honor/In the secret of atmosphere.”
Sachs’s poem is of course the poem of the Jewish nation, but her greatness lies in the fact that she writes that the fate of the Jewish people is not only the Jewish people , but is universal to contemporary mankind, and then embraces the foolish agitation that made this fate with unquestionable serenity. As seen in this “I see a place” poem that I like very much.
”I saw a place with a stove/And a man’s hat/O dear, what kind of sand/Can understand your blood?//There is no door on the threshold/Waiting for someone to cross-/Your The house, dear, I feel/is completely covered with snow by God.”
What is written in the first paragraph is the universality of life and death. The stove can be a tool for cooking and heating, or it can be an incinerator; a hat can be a status symbol, a coronation, a military helmet or a prayer cap, all mixed in the relic pile. Between the two, there must be blood, but there must be no sand that can drain Abel’s blood. Cain killed his brother Abel, which was the first murder recorded by human beings in the Bible, and the killing has continued in the world since then.
However, in the next paragraph, the steep transfer people praise, this “you” is not only the “you” who bleeds in the previous paragraph, but also the “people” who are waiting. It contains the biblical allusion of “The Prodigal Son”, and also echoes the famous work “Winter Night” by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, who is Nelly Sachs’ fate counterpart, especially these two lines. :
”The wanderer steps in silently; / Pain has turned the threshold to stone.”
Interestingly, Trakl’s poem, as Heidegger’s great advocacy in “On the Way to Language”, is widely known, But Heidegger, as we all know now, was at one point a Nazi sympathizer. The echoes of these two poems also appeared in the poem “Assisi” by Nelly Sachs’ long-term friend Paul Celan mourning his son:
”Stone, wherever you look, stone. / Let the gray beast come in. Well.” All
three poets tried to take on the pain in verse. In Nelly Sachs, although “you” is homeless like the guards in Du Fu’s “Homeless”, they are like wandering souls, but “doorless” means that there are doors everywhere, and God’s snow covers the dead and the living. The man (again implicated in Joyce’s novel “The Dead”), transcends the pain between sand and blood with absolute stillness, bridging the difference on both sides of the threshold, because our house has lost its roof, and the snow is cancelled. Door.
In just eight lines of poetry, Sachs built a prayer room that everyone can enter, where human love and hate coexist with God’s mercy, saving not only the Jews of the 1940s, but also us today. As we struggle to survive a pandemic, can our prayers go beyond the absurd and bring us back to our essence—our naked life? Then meet the snow that wakes us up completely.
