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 Lagerlöf, 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 The daughter of an inventor and industrialist, she had written some poems that were totally commonplace and mostly unpublished.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?