Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, Ruth and Matthew Mead, and Michael Roloff. Introduction by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It was while living in Sweden in fear and agitation that German-born Nelly Sachs began again to write: "Writing was my mute outcry; I wrote only because I had to free myself," she observed. In den Wohnungen des Todes, written from 1944-45 and published in 1947, and Sternverdunkelung, of 1949—books whose entire contents, with a few exceptions, appear in this volume—represent Sachs's major writing of this painful period, works which brought her the Nobel Prize for Literature, with S. Y. Agnon, in 1966.

Author City: Schöneberg GER

Nobel Prize winning poet Nelly Sachs grew up in Berlin, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Her early verse appeared in various German newspapers throughout the mid-1930s; but her life would soon be caught up in the tragic events of the German Jews, as she watched friends and family sent to their doom. In 1940, she and her mother escaped to Sweden through the help the Swedish author Selma Lagerlof, Prince Eugene of the Swedish Royal Court, and a German friend, Gudrun Harlan Dahnert.