Worlds

by Gertrud Kolmar, Philip Kuhn (Translator), Ruth Von Zimmermann (Translator)

Welten (Worlds) is a cycle of poems written in the second half of 1937 by Gertrud Kolmar, who was to perish six years later in Auschwitz. The manuscript was passed in 1947 by her brother-in-law to Peter Suhrkamp, publisher at Suhrkamp Verlag-now Germany's premier literary press-and was one of the first books to appear from Suhrkamp after the war.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Gertrud Käthe Chodziesner, known by the literary pseudonym Gertrud Kolmar, was a German lyric poet and writer. She was born in Berlin and died, after her arrest and deportation as a Jew, in Auschwitz, a victim of the Nazi Final Solution. Though she was a cousin of Walter Benjamin, little is known of her life. She is considered one of the finest poets in the German language.

Post-war critics have accorded Kolmar a very high place in literature. Jacob Picard, in his epilogue to Gertrud Kolmar: Das Lyrische Werk described her both as 'one of the most important woman poets' in the whole of German literature, and 'the greatest lyrical poetess of Jewish descent who has ever lived'.

Michael Hamburger withheld judgement on the latter affirmation on the grounds he was not sufficiently competent to judge, but agreed with Picard's high estimation of her as a master poet in the German lyrical canon.

Patrick Bridgwater, citing the great range of her imagery and verse forms, and the passionate integrity which runs through her work, likewise writes that she was 'one of the great poets of her time, and perhaps the greatest woman poet ever to have written in German.

Reviews

[BJ Lillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welten [Worlds], Gertrud Kolmar’s exquisite cycle of German-language poems, was published posthumously in 1947. It was written in the late 30s, the last of Kolmar’s poetry to make it out of Nazi Germany. Like much of her surviving work, Kolmar sent the manuscript to her sister, who had taken refuge in Switzerland. Kolmar stayed behind in Berlin to care for her elderly father. She was murdered at Auschwitz.

The poems in Welten are exactly as described—worlds. They roam far and wide, slipping across seas, whispering over forgotten landscapes. The poems are dense and light, vague and specific. They seem to grapple with Judaism, with the “East,” with—obliquely—racial otherness, in a way that can read as orientalist, but, given their moment, and also the poems’ own depths of thought and feeling, carries or disguises a deeper, more personal meaning. Though I feel as if, in reading the poems only the once, and in my second language, I have barely skated across their delicate swarming surfaces, only glimpsed their depths.

The cycle opens (in my own—I’m sure very flawed—translation):

She took the silver pen
And sent it out over the white dull gleaming flatlands:
Her country. It moved
and made mountains.
Bare mountains, naked angular stony forehead peaks, brooding over wasteland

It ends:

She mimics—the ghostly maid—you, the mistress,
feigns your gestures, your word, steals your name,
If you dive down to the innermost depths of our star,
Bathe in overflowing fire…
Burn…
Bury the shame that the fool lays bare, your center
Secret, receive the seed of flame.
And the born, demon-vultures, let them circle eternally
over the towers of the dead,
Towers of silence…

Five of six reviews for Welten are in Spanish. One of my favorite things about Goodreads is seeing how certain books find audiences in unexpected languages (my all time favorite example being the marked popularity of Ursula Le Guin’s mostly forgotten 1976 YA novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else in Turkish). Anyway, Spanish and German readers are in luck. English readers will have to seek out the eleven (of seventeen) poems from Welten translated in Dark Soliloquy: The Selected Poems of Gertrud Kolmar. I recommend that they do.

[Aila Dominguez Ramonet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Después de haber leído sus novelas pensé que Gertrud Kolmar no me podía fascinar más, pero obviamente estaba equivocada.
Había leído que su mejores obras son sus poemas y está claro que es así: no hay comparación. En sus novelas ya vemos que la autora tiene un estilo lleno de un imaginario relacionado con animales, la naturaleza y que estas son muy potentes...pero en sus poemas va más allá.
Kolmar tiene un estilo muy marcado, tiene un modelo que se va repitiendo constantemente y aunque puede sonar a pesado, para nada es así: la personificación de los animales, el uso constante de adjetivos relacionados con colores y texturas hace que veas con mucha facilidad y belleza las escenas que ella nos intenta transmitir. Aunque de manera muy abstracta, y en casi todo momento sin querer decirnos lo que nos quiere decir directamente, nos transmite mucho.

Esque no puedo decir más cosas porque sino no pararía. Sencillamente genial.

[Miriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5/5⭐

"¿Por qué me censuráis?
¿Por qué os burláis de mí?
¿Porque mi mundo es chato, con pocos pasos que dar en un cuadrado, entre muros estrechos,
repleto de cosas baladíes, sin gloria, de insignificantes quehaceres?"

[La Pasión Inútil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poesía hermética, sutil y de paisajes siempre íntimos que refleja la siempre introspectiva personalidad de Kolmar. Aquí hay una gran exploración de la sensualidad femenina, la muerte y el extravío de sí mismo.

[Carlos Santiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nunca pensé que la irrealidad más exótica podía ser tan real y sensual. Si, es una pedantería pero no encuentro mejores palabras para definir este libro, poemario en prosa.

[Sofía Delia Nowendsztern · Rating 5 out of 5]

La poesía de Gertrud Kolmar es de por sí magnífica, pero es que encima la traducción realizada por Bertha Vías Mahou consigue transmitir esa genialidad en español.

[Nasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, far away, the river whispers to its banks.