Mother Tongue: Selected Poems

by Rose Ausländer

"There were two ways to respond to that unbearable reality," wrote Rose Ausländer thirty years later, remembering the Chernovtsy ghetto under the Nazis. "Either one could despair entirely, or one could occupy a different, spiritual reality. And while we waited for death, there were those of us who dwelt in dreamwords - our traumatic home amidst our homelessness. To write was to live."

That experience remained as the dark undertow of all the poetry Ausländer wrote, though she rarely addressed it explicitly. Most of her poetry dated from the years between her move to Düsseldorf in 1965, and her death in 1988. That late poetry - much of which is represented in this collection - which came as leaves to the tree and brought her prizes and acclaim, established her extraordinary simplicity as a distinctive voice in German poetry. By the end of her life, she was recognised as one of the truest poets of post-War Germany, a woman and a witness in whom the dark and the light, the ashes and the hope, are so finely balanced that we hold our breath as we read.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

Rose Ausländer, a German-speaking Jewish poet from Czernowitz/Bukovina who spent much of her life in exile in the United States and Germany, wrote that her true home was the word itself. Her poem Mutterland (Motherland) distinguishes between national identity and individual identity which is informed by language: “My fatherland is dead/they have buried it/in fire./I live/in my motherland/word” (Mein Vaterland ist tot/sie haben es begraben/im Feuer/Ich lebe/in meinem Mutterland/Wort). Ausländer is known for her crystalline poems describing the natural wonders of the world, such as stars, butterflies and flowers, as well as her experiences in the Czernowitz ghetto during World War II and the Shoah, her life in exile, her travels through Europe, and her relationship to family and friends. While her early poems are tightly structured and rhymed, her later poetry is influenced by the modern rhythms of free verse which she encountered while reading modern poetry during her exile in the United States and in her meetings with Paul Celan (Paul Antschel 1920–1970). She also translated Yiddish poems by Itzik Manger (1901–1969) into German and German poems by Else Lasker-Schüler and Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) into English. From 1948 to 1956, while in exile in New York, she wrote approximately thirty poems in English. Ausländer dedicated many of her poems to those who had inspired her personal philosophy and writing, such as the writers Heinrich Heine, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl and Marie Luise Kaschnitz, as well as the philosopher Constantin Brunner (1862–1937). Ausländer’s lifetime correspondence with Brunner began when she sent him one of her early poems, Niagara Falls I. Upon receiving it Brunner replied that he had been standing in spirit with Ausländer before Niagara Falls (Ed. Braun, p. 5). Brunner’s death moved Ausländer to write the poem “Constantin Brunner In Memoriam,” which laments the loss of her long-time mentor yet ends on a hopeful note: “He is not dead, and his words float/in the space of the soul above our life” (“Er ist nicht tot, und seine Worte schweben/im Raum des Geistes über unserem Leben;” Ed. Braun, p. 191).