Black Dove
Black dove
midnight
bring the sleepbranch
after the daily flood
Place it on the
tremoring nerve
when the world
turns
stars complete
their deaths
Back then you know
peacebird
were you white
Here
dark colors
more weight
The branch
alighted ark
sleep
Without a Visa
Into the world without a visa
eyeing everywhere
our kind is always
suspicious
On the lookout tower
I raise a white handkerchief
in all directions
my hope
a visa for love
to green faith
flowers
It could even
will even be spring
Unity of Dust
We
wordweavers
devoted heretics
starflyers
in love
with the earth
we burn
to ashes in the woodfire
we sing hymns
to the electric dust
braids us together
dust builds
breaks us
Three Poems
Rose Ausländer
translated from the German by Carlie Hoffman
I first encountered Rose Ausländer in a footnote of John Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale University Press; 2001). In the text, there’s a quote downplaying Ausländer’s connection to Celan’s “Todesfuge” [Deathfuge] (which he wrote around 1944) and Celan’s inheritance of Ausländer’s image “Schwarze Milch” [black milk] in in his poem. However, in the index one is led to the biography of Celan by Israel Chalfan, where he quotes a transcript of Ausländer acknowledging and extolling Celan’s use of her image, as they were friends and she was delighted that “[Celan] has raised [black milk] to the highest level of poetic expression. It has become a part of him.”
The “black milk” image appears in Ausländer’s poem “Ins Leben/To Life,” which she wrote in 1925. This was the first poem of Ausländer’s that I translated and the first time the poem appeared in English in a publication in the United States (Jewish Currents). From there, I began my years-long endeavor in translating Ausländer’s poems for the first essential selection of her work to be published in the United States, which is forthcoming from Four Way Books.
Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) was a prominent and prolific Jewish, German-language poet and translator, born in 1901 in what was then Czernowitz, Austria, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Ausländer survived the Shoah by living in hiding in the Jewish ghetto.
The “black milk” image appears in Ausländer’s poem “Ins Leben/To Life,” which she wrote in 1925. This was the first poem of Ausländer’s that I translated and the first time the poem appeared in English in a publication in the United States (Jewish Currents). From there, I began my years-long endeavor in translating Ausländer’s poems for the first essential selection of her work to be published in the United States, which is forthcoming from Four Way Books.
Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) was a prominent and prolific Jewish, German-language poet and translator, born in 1901 in what was then Czernowitz, Austria, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Ausländer survived the Shoah by living in hiding in the Jewish ghetto.
Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) was a Jewish, German-language poet and translator born in 1901 in what was then Czernowitz, Austria, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. She is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and the recipient of several German literary awards including the Droste-Prize of Meersburg (1967), the Ida-Dehmel-Prize, the Andreas-Gryphius Prize, the Roswitha-Medallion of Bad Gandersheim (1980), and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Art (1984). Ausländer lived most of her life between Eastern Europe and New York City and eventually lived in the Nelly Sacks House in Düsseldorf. She died on January 3, 1988. Ausländer wrote approximately 3000 poems during her lifetime, with many draft versions, and even translated her own poems from German to English. Themes that are significant to her work include the Shoah, exile, Judaism, family, language, mother tongue, poetic expression as homeland, love, and aging.
Carlie Hoffman is the author of the poetry collections One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025); When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award in Poetry as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. Hoffman is the translator of the German of both Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Blütenlese (Harvest of Blossoms), forthcoming from World Poetry Books, and White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2024), and of the poems of Rose Ausländer. Hoffman’s other honors include a 92NY Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor in chief of Small Orange Journal.
