Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs

About Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs, born on December 10, 1891 and died on May 12, 1970 in Stockholm, is a Swedish, Jewish, German-speaking poet of the twentieth century. She has also translated Swedish poetry anthologies into German. Her first collection of poems was published in 1946 and entitled 'In the mansions of death', this collection of poems deals especially with the night, the memory and exile. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 for her remarkable lyric and dramatic work that interprets the fate of Israel with sensitivity and strength. She shares this award with Shmuel Yosef Agnon. She died four years later, a few weeks after Paul Celan who she was one of his friends and with whom she maintained a rich correspondence from 1954 to 1969 which has been an open dialogue where exchange both the torment of the disease, the poetic questionings , personal and historical dramas.
The work of Nelly Sachs is in great part influenced by german romanticism that finds its inspiration in the Bible as well as Kabbalah and Hasidism, is part of the break caused by the arrival of Nazism in Europe, and exiles, rifts and bereavements. caused by this event. The last years of Sachs are marked by physical illness and its fight against mental illness. However, even if her writing, born of pain and drama, affirms the desire to give a stele of words to the dead whose total disappearance was desired, the poet still expresses a certain amount of hope and the need to believe in the future, to be present to the world, however infernal it is. It is in the incessant reading of the Bible, among other texts, that she draws this ability to believe in humanity.

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