Professor Joshua Weiner Shortlisted for 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry

Weiner's translation of Nelly Sachs' "Flight and Metamorphosis" is one of six finalists for the award.

English Professor Joshua Weiner's translation of "Flight and Metamorphosis," a poetry collection by poet, dramatist and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs, has been shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association's 2023 National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. The collection was translated from German by Weiner with Linda B. Parshall.

The judges' citation reads:

Joshua Weiner’s formidable translations reveal Nelly Sachs as a powerful visionary poet, transcending her revered reputation as a “Holocaust poet.” Flight and Metamorphosis is a collection “where mystical artifice and natural objects join; where biblical prophecy and individual vision fuse; where concrete images transform with surrealistic fluidity…” Weiner grapples throughout with the sense of Geheimnis—the mystery, the secret, the deep dark yearning for home—at the heart of Sachs’ poetry. Without leaving the body, Sachs illuminates the world anew through her inner language of ciphers, at once universal and deeply personal: “Who dies/ here last/ will carry the grain of sun/ between his lips/ will thundercrack the night/ in death-throe rot.”