Translating the poetry of Nelly Sachs

Jean Boase-Beier

pp. 21-37

in: Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa (eds), The Palgrave handbook of literary translation, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

German Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, a writer who fled the Nazis, and a translator whose translations of Swedish Modernist poets profoundly affected her poetic expression, is often considered a difficult poet. Her poems have been translated into English by several different translators. A comparison of different translated versions is thus possible, and Boase-Beier argues in this chapter that such a comparison not only sheds light upon the translations themselves and the particular interpretations that underlie them, but also, by highlighting points of ambiguity or stylistic complexity, upon the original poems. The insights thus gained, in the context of critical engagement with her work in its original German, can help us to see how future English translations of her poems might be undertaken and presented.

Cited authors

Sachs Nelly