Nelly Sachs

Nelly Sachs was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1966. In 1967 America started to see her poetry translated into English and published in books, most notably the FSG collections O The Chimneys and The Seeker. Both these collections held part of Sachs’ Glowing Enigmas translated by Michael Hamburger. In those two volumes is where I fell in love with Nelly Sachs. I found a sensitivity I hadn’t seen anywhere other than in Rilke, and a compassion I haven’t found anywhere else. Her Glowing Enigmas is a beautiful testimony of persecution and loss elevated to the highest art. It has had the profoundest effect on me. It has been a simple instructional on seriousness, and, also, a complex and mysterious example of being alive. I have always wished (ever since I bought that first darkly browned paperback) that Glowing Enigmas would be published in one volume so I could read it as I waited for the bus. I wanted an ease of understanding. I wanted to be able to refer back to page one when reading section four without having to lug an additional volume.

What I didn’t know is that it would take Tavern Books to publish Glowing Enigmas in its entirety. And Friday was the day. The books showed up packed in boxes stacked on a pallet. Over the next week, we will be sending Sachs’ book out for review, and it will be available for purchase in April. Not many things in the book world have made me as happy as seeing Glowing Enigmas in a form easy to carry. William Butler Yeats once wrote about Rabindranath Tagore “I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.” Here’s to public transportation and not being afraid to read in public.

Carl Adamshick

Nelly Sachs' Glowing Enigmas will be available in paperback and hardcover editions through the Tavern Books website April 2, 2013. 

Glowing Enigmas

by Nelly Sachs

  POETRY

Translated from the German 

by Michael Hamburger

Publication date: April 2, 2013

120 pages / 5.5 x 7.5

$17.00 (pb) / $30.00 (hc)

ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-22-2 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-1-935635-27-7 (hc) 

Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Berlin on December 10, 1891. She fled the Nazis on May 16, 1940, and took refuge in Sweden, where she was granted asylum. Her career as a poet started only after her emigration, when she was nearly fifty years old. Despite her relatively short writing career and constant struggles with mental illness, Sachs’ body of poetry is one of the essential artistic testimonies of the twentieth century. She died in Sweden on May 12, 1970.

Michael Hamburger was born in Berlin in 1924 to a German-Jewish family that emigrated to England in 1933. He served as an infantryman from 1943 to 1947, and read Modern Languages at Oxford. After an academic career in England and America, he settled in Suffolk. In addition to his international  renown as a poet and scholar, Hamburger is regarded as one of the great literary translators of his generation. Among the numerous authors he translated into English are Charles Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Georg Trakl. His acclaimed critical study The Truth of Poetry was published in 1968. His Collected Poems (Anvil, 1995), drawing on some twenty earlier books, has been followed by five more. His final book of poems, Circling the Square, was published by Anvil in 2007, the year of his death.     

Subscriptions to The Honest Pint now available!

Tavern Friends,
 

Back in October, we unveiled plans for The Honest Pint, our subscription series edited by Matthew Dickman. It's now in full swing, with subscriptions available through the updated page on our website!

The Honest Pint is an ongoing series of brief prose pieces written by contemporary poets about the work of other poets. Each month starting in January 2013, subscribers will receive an envelope containing some form of original printed matter—an expository essay, a cartoon strip, a review, or an interview, for example—in which a poet responds to a poem of his or her choice.

These epistolary experiments will come to your mailbox from the likes of Albert Goldbarth, Matthew Zapruder, and Diane Wakoski, among others. But don't expect this kind of disclosure from us for long—the identity of each month's sender will remain a mystery until you break the envelope's seal.
 

We hope you're as excited as we are. Cheers!

From the Planet Goldbarthiana

Thanks to Division Leap for hosting our Albert Goldbarth / The End of Space event last night. The standing-room-only reading was a smash, and it was a great way to kick off the release of our latest Tavern title. In the next few weeks we'll get the book added to our online catalog, where it will be available for purchase.

Cheers, and happy reading.

Tavern recommends: City of Rivers by Zubair Ahmed

City of Rivers is hot off the press from McSweeney's (as a title in their McSweeney's Poetry Series), and we can't recommend it enough. Zubair Ahmed (Tavern author of Ashulia) has been receiving rave reviews for City of Rivers, with comparisons being drawn between his inventive and beautiful lyric poems and those penned by James Wright in The Branch Will Not Break. Not shabby.

Happy Reading!

Albert Goldbarth reads this Saturday! Don't forget!

Howdy, folks. Just a friendly reminder that Tavern Books author Albert Goldbarth will be reading from his new Tavern collection THE END OF SPACE.

Please join us for this Pylon Reading Society event (FREE and open to the public. Books for sale)



Who: Albert Goldbarth
What: Reading / Book Release Party for The End of Space
When: 7:30, Saturday, December 15th
Where: Division Leap / 211 SW 9th Ave / Portland

If you haven't been to Division Leap, then you're in for a treat. This is one of the Northwest's finest poetry bookstores and indie galleries. They have an amazing selection of literary ephemera and arts-movement-related poetry goodies. And they go far out of their way to support local publishers--they stock multiple copies of every Tavern Books title and broadside, including signed and hardcover editions.

Cheers! Hope to see you there!

 

Tavern Books + Street Books

We've recently added Portland-based nonprofit Street Books to our list of libraries participating in Poetry State. Street Books is an amazing program that serves Portland's homeless community by offering a mobile library service to those who live outside. Yes, you do see a totally cool, totally mobile bicycle library in the background of this photo. We are delighted to supply Street Books with fine books of poetry, and we wish them the best in their worthwhile endeavors. Click here for more info.

The Honest Pint

Tavern Books is pleased to announce its forthcoming subscription series, The Honest Pint, which will be edited by Matthew Dickman. Here's how it works: each month, subscribers will receive a brief prose piece written by a contemporary poet celebrating the work of another poet. Each piece will be uniquely printed and accompanied by exciting ephemera. Nothing digital about it. This analog-era throwback is all about paper, ink, and a poet’s brain. The monthly Honest Pint will take many shapes: traditional essay, cross-genre experiment, cartoon strip, hand-written note, a brief interview—you name it! The purpose of this series is to connect the diverse landscape of contemporary poets to the reading public in a casual, meaningful, and unexpected way. We'll offer subscriptions starting in December, and will mail out the first honest print in January 2013. We have many exciting authors lined up for this project, including Albert Goldbarth and Diane Wakoski. Also in the works is the Tavern Books iPhone app. Check back soon!