Habitations of Death

O THE CHIMNEYS by Nelly Sachs. 387 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.50.

The neutrality of Sweden in war is much simpler to comprehend than the delicate balancing act that it practices in world literature. The Swedish Academy hands out the Nobel Prize with a fine impartiality. This year a Frenchman, another time a German. Now a Russian of whom even Stalin could approve, then a Russian who cannot even show up to accept the award. And there are the obscure choices--the Icelandic novelist or the Italian poet, each known to only a handful even in his own country.*

In 1966, as far as most readers knew, S. Y. Agnon and Nelly Sachs might have been creatures of the Nobel committee's imagination. Placing Agnon was easier: he turned out to be Israel's top novelist. But Nelly Sachs was a poser: A Jewish woman poet of 75 who wrote in German and lived (as she still does) in Sweden. Had the academy simply decided that it was the turn of Jewish writers? Did it already have in the wings an unsung Arab for the next time around?

The doubters can now rest easy. In Nelly Sachs, the academy or its scouts turned up the real thing. Poetry is the power to make the spirit soar even when meaning is obscured by emotion, and her work fully measures up to that definition. Nelly Sachs and the Nobel Prize were properly joined.

Chain of Enigma. In flight from Nazi Germany, she went to Sweden in 1940 through the combined efforts of a member of the Swedish royal family and famed Novelist Selma Lagerloef, herself a Nobel winner. At 48, the refugee brought with her only an aged mother and the numbness induced by terror. Physically, she was so small that she was at first billeted in a children's home. The daughter of an inventor and industrialist, she had written some poems that were totally commonplace and mostly unpublished. Now, galvanized by the experience of her people, she began to write the poems that can be seen, in her own words, as

This chain of enigmas

hung on the neck of night.

This volume of selected poems, published in English and German text, takes its title from the first:

O the chimneys

On the ingeniously devised habitations of death

When Israel's body drifted as smoke

Through the air--

Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,

A star that turned black

Or was it a ray of sun?

The wonder is that Nelly Sachs could summon up a poetic vision that resolutely exorcised bitterness:

Your century

a weeping willow

overhung incomprehensible things.

Not revenge but stunned incomprehension informs the question:

Ear of mankind

overgrown with nettles,

would you hear?

If the voice of prophets blew

on flutes made of

murdered children's bones

and exhaled airs burnt with martyrs' cries --

if they built a bridge of old men's dying

groans--

Ear of mankind

occupied with small sounds,

would you hear?

All's Metamorphosis. Nelly Sachs chose to answer that question in a context of creation and death and new creation that seemed to start with the Book of Genesis and engage the support of the higher sciences. Both the small sounds and the indifference belong to the cosmic flow that includes all things. "Sleep and dying are neutral," and man is precious matter that life shapes and death changes into something new. Even all that is worst in man can ultimately be absorbed:

When the man seduced by sleep rises

guilt-laden

from the wellshaft of morning

he does not know

that he is wrapped in the nightclothes of the chrysalis

for still he has not experienced his rebirth

nor abandoned himself to his death.

All's metamorphosis.

Thus she placed the sum total of the horror she knew in the continuing life cycle of the universe, instead of bending her talent to uttering justified curses against her time and place. That must have taken a consuming strength.

*Among those who never received its accolade: Kafka, Tolstoy, Brecht, Chekhov, Conrad, Joyce, Twain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.