PRAISE FOR HILDE DOMIN'S POETRY:
“There is an air of earnestness and sincerity about [Domin’s] poems—they don’t perform linguistic tricks . . . They are highly specific, idiosyncratic, and beautifully ordinary. Reading her, one is filled with a sense of natural wonder . . . Kafatou, who knew Domin, has sympathetically rendered a work as tender as it is beautiful . . . Kafatou’s translations allow one to sense both Domin’s self-possession and her insecurity.”
—Jewish Review of Books
“These translations and poems are full of the refugee’s loss and longing, made infinitely richer by Kafatou’s love for the poet and poems. This is a deeply loving, compassionate collection of poems, remaining anchored, ultimately, in the exile’s intertwined desire and nostalgia for home.”
—The Massachusetts Review
“A beautiful selection of Domin’s work. Readers who enjoyed Nelly Sachs’s recently translated collection, Flight and Metamorphosis, will delight in their discovery of another Jewish German poet. US English-language readers in particular will see shadows of twentieth-century extremism and exile in their own contemporary landscape.”
—Jewish Book Council
"At last, the poetry of Hilde Domin, one of Germany’s finest twentieth-century lyric poets, is available in English . . . The wonder of these translations, both Kafatou’s and Burrows’s, is how the poems whisper to us in English as well. It’s a mysterious effect, accomplished not only through close attention to sense—that 'play of light and shade,' of clarity and elusiveness—but to the sounds of speech, where the poet-translators’ arrangements form a kind of language within the language . . . These translators and publishers have made an important contribution, bringing us two books that deserve widespread attention."
—Harvard Review on two translations of Hilde Domin's poetry, With My Shadow and The Wandering Radiance
“Sarah Kafatou's translations capture the wonder and fragility of Domin’s poems. This collection is a great gift to readers of English, who at last can share a sense of being addressed directly by this unique voice, one that is soaked in the experience of displacement and exile and that encourages us to build the world anew from the shards of pain and trauma.”
—Aleida Assmann, author of Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity
“What a revelation the poems of Hilde Domin are in Sarah Kafatou’s masterful translations. Concise and elemental, Domin’s sleight-of-hand lyrics transmute weight into flight, ash into light. She bleeds blue ink: each word is dear, of value. Domin is a public poet with a private voice, in the manner of Neruda and Oppen, ministering to the unvoiced, the exiled, the unwanted (whether feelings or beings), attending to what is most humble, most human.”
—Susan Barba, author of Fair Sun
“Hilde Domin is a lyrical poet of flight and displacement: To escape one more time / under the belly of the ram. / One more time / beneath the counting hand. Her poems conjure a life in constant flux, and a longing for stillness, stability. Yet rootedness and a sense of belonging are elusive. Her imagery releases uneasy truths of startling vibrancy, depth, and power. I am grateful to Sarah Kafatou for faithfully and lucidly bringing Hilde Domin’s poetry to English-speaking readers.”
—Jane Duran, author of the clarity of distant things
“Her poems always have weight. The weight of a lived life.”
—Ulla Hahn, novelist
“Domin’s level voice has the philosophical seriousness, the political astuteness, and the lightness of touch of great Polish poets such as Zagajewski, Herbert, and Szymborska. Like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, Domin never loses sight of the dead, and her delicacy of perception is the palpable essence of tenderness itself. Sarah Kafatou’s brilliant translation is pitch-perfect, and in tune with these sublime poems of melodious eloquence and immense discretion.”
—George Kalogeris, author of Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation
“These powerful and moving poems express with simplicity and profundity the feelings of loss and insecurity of a courageous Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Domin’s use of metaphor, often drawn from nature, provides comfort, hope, and a sense of universality, keeping her poems relevant today. Sarah Kafatou’s skillful translations bring the poems across perfectly into English.”
—Martha Leigh, author of Invisible Ink
“Sarah Kafatou gives us Hilde Domin’s poetry in a lucid, lyrical English which superbly captures the chaste intensity for which Domin was acclaimed. These fine translations offer a window into the mind and heart of an outstanding German poet who came into her own in the last forty years of her long life and who would say of her own work ‘my simple words smell of humanity.’”
—Michael O'Siadhail, author of The Five Quintets
