da Versi Vissuti

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.