With My Shadow: The Poems of Hilde Domin, A Bilingual Selection

by Hilde Domin, Sarah Kafatou (Translator)

“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 Not to tire / but to hold out your hand / gently / as to a bird / to the miracle This bilingual edition of the poems of Hilde Domin, an outstanding lyric poet of exile and return, brings her work to English-speaking readers for the first time. Hilde Domin fled Nazi Germany when, as a Jew, she was no longer safe there. For many years she lived in Italy and the Dominican Republic, where she encountered modernist currents in Italian and Spanish poetry. Returning permanently to Germany in the mid-1950s, she quickly found recognition as a poet of memory and reconciliation. For the rest of her long life she wrote and spoke in a tone poised between vulnerability and trust, on behalf of moral and civic values worth living for.  As Sarah Kafatou writes in her Introduction, Domin “is always she reworks and transforms her repertoire of metaphors, images, themes, and ideas again and again, extending and refining, never explaining too much. Her lyric sensibility is concise, her syntax and vocabulary are simple and apt, her short lines break on the phrase, and she has an uncanny ability to hit the right note at exactly the right moment, according to the rhythm of the breath.” Domin writes of “people like us we among them,” providing a voice for victims of persecution everywhere. Today, with refugee populations on the move throughout the world and with rising intolerance and polarization, these poems of conscience, and of courage discovered in desperation, will speak directly to every reader.

Genres: Poetry

190 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2023

About the author

Hilde Domin, whose real name was Hilde Palm (née Löwenstein), was a German lyric poet and writer. She was amongst the most important German-language poets of her time.
She later described her life as a “linguistic odyssey,” a journey from one language to the next. But her native German remained her constant home throughout the years of exile. Raised in a Jewish family in Köln (Cologne), Hilde Löwenstein first studied law, then philosophy and political science in Heidelberg, Köln and Berlin. Because of her Jewish background and her socialist involvement she decided at 23 to leave Germany at the end of 1932 and continue her studies in Italy. In 1935 she received her doctorate in Florence in political science; in 1936 she married her fellow student, the art historian Erwin Walter Palm (1910-1988). The couple survived “literally on language”: Dr. Hilde Palm taught language courses and translated the scholarly writings of her husband. In the spring of 1939 the Palms fled by way of Paris to Great Britain, and on to Santo Domingo in the summer of 1940. Hilde Palm translated and taught language courses; her husband gained a professorship in art history and established himself as a specialist in Portuguese and Spanish colonial art.
Hilde Palm’s father died in 1940 in American exile, her mother in 1951. At this point she began to write in German, and that was her salvation, the “alternative to suicide.” And it was the beginning of the couple’s return in the early 1950’s, which took them via New York, Madrid and Frankfurt/M. to Heidelberg, where Palm obtained a professorship in 1960. From then on Hilde Palm took the name of the place where she had become a poet. As Hilde Domin she published several volumes of poetry, including “Nur eine Rose als Stütze” (1959; Only a Rose for Support), “Rückkehr der Schiffe” (1962; Return of the Ships), “Ich will dich” (1970; I Want You). She also published autobiographical texts, a novel, and essays on poetological, sociological and literary theoretical topics, as well as carrying on an “almost sisterly correspondence” with the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, still in Swedish exile. Hilde Domin held to a concept of poetry that is politically committed and dialogical, poetry whose magic resides in its simplicity. When giving readings she would read each poem twice over. Her poems were translated into more than 20 languages, and she was honored with international prizes.

http://hildedomin.megtaylor.co.uk/