SOURCE: "Concrete (Literal) versus Abstract (Figurative) Translations in Nelly Sachs's Poetry," in Translation Review, No. 18, 1985, pp. 26-9.

In the following excerpt from her dissertation entitled "Nelly Sachs and Kabbala," Holzer discusses the problem of conveying in other languages the multiple meanings created in Sachs's highly symbolic poetry.

During the process of translating [Nelly Sachs's] Teile Dich Nacht, I frequently came across individual words that seemed of key importance within a poem but resisted translation. Upon closer inspection of such an obstacle, I would often find that the word functioned both on a literal and a figurative level, and that the English language forced me to make a choice between the two. In German both possibilities would clearly echo within the context of the poem, but in English I would lose that echo. I would then try to comb the poem for clues that would support either a literal...