Rose Ausländer

I am at work translating the first essential collection of Rose Ausländer’s work to be published in the United States (forthcoming with Four Way Books). Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) was a prominent and prolific Jewish, German-language poet and translator, born in 1901 in what was then Czernowitz, Austria, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Ausländer survived the Shoah by living in hiding in the Jewish ghetto.  You can read about my journey, as well as read selected poems I’ve translated from the German of Rose Ausländer, over time on this page.

Discovering, translating, and writing critically about Rose Ausländer’s poetry has been one of the most impactful endeavors of my life. This work has deepened my relationship to language, alongside my ongoing exploration of language’s and religion’s connection to cultural and national identity across time and place and in the 21st century through poetry, as well as the legacy of Jewish women poets’ writings as revolutionary.

This is the first poem of Rose Ausländer’s that I translated, beginning my years-long endeavor translating her work, which you can read about here on the Poetry Foundation. The poem is called “To Life,” was originally published in 1939, and my translation is the first time the poem has appeared in English (Jewish Currents). I write about my discovery of Ausländer’s original “black milk” image in her poem “To Life,” the significance surrounding the lineage and transmission of her image through time in the context of World War I, the Holocaust, displacement, and exile, alongside her friendship with fellow Czernowitz poet and contemporary Paul Celan, as “black milk” became elevated through Celan’s “Todesfuge/Deathfugue,” here in the Jewish Currents Paul Celan Centennial folio.

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