They are nine women with much in common--all German speaking,
all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation
that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each
provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on
language, place, poetry, and womanhood.
"After Every War" is a book of translations of women poets
living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose
Auslander, Elisabeth Langgasser, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else
Lasker-Schuler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar
Nick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and,
therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest
occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as
those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the
time--but with a difference. These poets see public events through
the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions,
the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost
soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer
ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which
life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the
reader into them.
The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical
notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her
interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has
observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country.
Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling
her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of
their work and to present their poems for what they are:
documentaries of resilience--of language, of music, and of the
human spirit--in the hardest of times."
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