The symbol
“She died of helplessness”
Might be what’s written on my gravestone
Wherever that might be, there’s no guarantee a person dies
Where she was born or where she lives
It could be anyplace
At that uncertain hour
There are no good countries or bad countries
But as a symbol I’d like a small star
Six-pointed, like the one that shimmered
On my threadbare coat as a child
Carve it into the stone real good
Like they carved into my skin
Into my flesh, into my innards
And if there’s another life
I will be a yellow star
To remind you once upon a time,
Auschwitz
To be born by chance
To be born by chance
To be born a woman
To be born poor
To be born Jewish
It’s too much
For a single life
Maybe
Of the men who count
In life
There’s only one:
The father who is missing
Life!
What great howling at the wind
What deep fear of everything
What a life full of terror
And of love, and of battles
For a little peace
For an inch
Of foreign soil
from Versi Vissuti
Edith Bruck
translated from the Italian by Jeanne Bonner
Listen to the original read by the poet:
The fiction and poetry of Edith Bruck often employ an unusual or unexpected angle to illuminate her personal experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis and the wider travails of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. In her short stories, for example, this approach manifests itself often through perspective. Most notably, one short story called “Silvia” is narrated by the young son of a high-level Nazi official in Germany who finds a young Jewish stowaway and brings her home to live with him. His mother, a proud Nazi spouse, reacts with revulsion as the girl settles into the house while her husband is away at the front. Bruck manages to evoke sympathy for the boy while fully enunciating every abhorrent nuance of his parents’ anti-semitism. In her poetry, including the poems published here, Bruck alternates between survival and remembrance. Her poems often begin calmly with simple observations or events, only to end with an evocation of the evil that forever changed her life. This is especially so in a poem like “The symbol,” which opens benignly with a matter-of-fact discussion of what her gravestone might look like. The underlying theme of Auschwitz becomes an idea that sneaks up on the reader, arguably recreating the poet’s state of mind as she lives her life in Rome, happily, quietly, unassumingly only to remember, as the last line informs us, that “once upon a time,/Auschwitz.”
This approach endows her poetry with a subtlety but also an edge. The experience of translating such work becomes the task of shifting from a seemingly light tone to one capable of representing evil in all its forms. Separately, as a translator of Bruck’s works, I feel something akin to anxiety about rendering her words and thoughts accurately. Her mission is to bear witness for those who perished, as she has stated repeatedly throughout her life, and everything I do as I translate her work needs to honor that mission.
This approach endows her poetry with a subtlety but also an edge. The experience of translating such work becomes the task of shifting from a seemingly light tone to one capable of representing evil in all its forms. Separately, as a translator of Bruck’s works, I feel something akin to anxiety about rendering her words and thoughts accurately. Her mission is to bear witness for those who perished, as she has stated repeatedly throughout her life, and everything I do as I translate her work needs to honor that mission.
Edith Bruck is a transnational Italian writer who was born in Hungary in 1932 and has been writing in Italian for more than half a century. Like her friend and peer Primo Levi, Bruck survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, which shaped much of her early work. She is the author of more than a dozen novels, short story collections, and works of nonfiction. Her novel, Lettera alla madre (Letter to My Mother) won the Rapallo award in 1989. She also won the Viareggio prize for her novel, Quante stelle c’è nel cielo. Her 1974 short story collection, Due Stanze Vuote, was nominated for Italy’s top literary prize, the Strega. She was the founder of the Teatro della Maddalena in Rome. In addition to her prodigious literary output, she is known as a committed Holocaust witness who visits Italian schools to share her experiences. Bruck is also a prolific poet, having authored Tatuaggio, Monologo, and other critically-acclaimed poetry collections.
Jeanne Bonner is a writer and literary translator who won the 2018 winner of the PEN America Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for her work-in-progress translation of Mariateresa Di Lascia's Passaggio in ombra. She’s been selected for a short fellowship at the New York Public Library to research works by Edith Bruck and other Italian women writers who survived the Holocaust. Her literary translations have been published by Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, and Trafika Europe. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, and Catapult. She began her career as a journalist, for print publications and National Public Radio stations, and has produced news stories for The New York Times, Delta Sky Magazine, NPR's Marketplace and All Things Considered, and CNN. She studied Italian literature at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in Writing from Bennington College.
