Please join us for a poetry reading by Joshua Weiner from his extraordinary new translation of Nelly Sachs’s book Flucht und Verwandlung (Flight and Metamorphosis).
Flight and Metamorphosis: Joshua Weiner Reads from his New Translation of Nelly Sachs’s Poetry
Thursday. February 9, 2023
7-8:30pm
200 Mary Graydon Center, Gianni Lounge
Nelly Sachs (1891-1970), one of the great German poets of the 20th century, is best known for her poems for the Holocaust victims for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1966. With this translation, Joshua Weiner, a poet and professor of English at the University of Maryland, brings forth the astonishing, visionary poems of Sachs’s 1959 collection, a work that speaks directly to the sense of loneliness and anxiety of our time. Sachs wrote the poems of Flight and Metamorphosis as a refugee in Stockholm where she fled Nazi Berlin with her elderly mother in 1940.
Written in the quiet of late night, these incisive and shattering poems release the transformational power of language to create change in ourselves and our world. Sachs writes: “Whoever’s crying/is searching for his melody/which the wind/leafed with music/has hidden in night.”
About our speaker
Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poems, The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013), From the Book of Giants (2006), and The World’s Room (2001). He encountered Sachs’s poetry during a stay in Berlin in 2015 when he reported on the refugee crisis in Europe and about which he later wrote a book of prose, Berlin Notebook: Where Are the Refugees?
Praising Flight and Metamorphosis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) a reviewer for The New York Times wrote: “Sachs, and this poem, and this book, arrive home as if longing is itself home, a domain of night, of oblivion, terror, also solace” (April 15, 2022). Flight and Metamorphosis was recently selected as one of “The 5 best poetry collections of 2022” by the Washington Post (November 17, 2022, Troy Jollimore).
This reading is organized by the Humanities Lab at American University, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Literature, the Jewish Studies Program, and the German Studies Program in the Department of World Languages and Cultures.
This event is free and open to the public. Join us for refreshments and conversation after the reading.
RSVP on Eventbrite.
Take a look at Weiner’s books and visit his website for links to his other talks and published work.
The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish offers a consummately searching admixture that reminds us that history and politics cannot pretend to rationality or linearity; they cannot even be stratified. Weiner has a near-prophetic ability to instruct and warn us, whether he is writing in the gentle voice of Whitman or the grim consequences of the contemporary war on terror. The conceit of Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, D.C., flows from one poem to another, illustrating intersections of identity, memory, and history. The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish is a book of moral seriousness and unflinching ambition that intimately reflects on family, illness, and the American dream.
From the Book of Giants is a wonderful example of how politics and art can come together in a way that is wholly unexpected. In a strange, bold amalgam of domestic narrative, political allegory, and lyric inventiveness, Weiner looks at politics from the vantage of a disaffected householder who has bizarre, visionary tendencies. The public and private spheres have completely collapsed into each other, and every attempt at solace, honest communication, or honorable action is being relentlessly undermined by the threat of death, by public lies, and by wholly inflexible ideologies that are always and everywhere diametrically opposed. But these poems in their prescience also transcend the category of political poems: they are works of original perception, poetic skill, and genuine strangeness.