55 “The language of childhood.”
“A stranger always has his homeland in his arms,” poet Nelly Sachs wrote in a letter to Paul Celan during a year plagued by trauma and terror. The aftermath of the Shoah ravaged her mind and heart—the idea of safety, a relic of childhood, had been obliterated. Nothing was incapable of becoming a genocidal conspiracy overnight. Any headline might grow tanks and guns and camps, depending on the soil that absorbed it, depending on the terrain, the weather, the season.
For Sachs, the Shoah’s annihilation of safety did not threaten poetry. Poetry had never been safe—poetry could not be destroyed by the terror of humans. Through poetry, Sachs gained access to the lost world.
In translating Sachs’ poems, Mireille Gansel determines that the language of childhood, “the language-land of the soul,” is the key to understanding her poems. But Gansel finds this language across multiple texts and borders in the writers she translated:
Language of childhood: Words which Aharon Appelfeld, typographer of interior language, found in the depths of darkness, recasting and recomposing every single letter which he then placed inside the mold of his ‘new language.’ Words which ‘took root’ in him and became his writing language.
“Language of childhood: This is the language whose words Czech writer Imre Kertesz discovered intact in Auschwitz, impregnable word-acts” of kindness, generosity, and hope among those who had been promised nothing outside of death.
When studying the words of Eugenie Goldstern, Gansel feels the earth move inside her, upon discovering that she is the stranger—she, herself, is the one who has “everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other.” To know that one is the stranger—”that was probably my most essential lesson in translation,” Gansel concludes.
Immigrant children grow up in varying relationships to their national security, by which I mean, the security of their legal existence and residence in a nation alongside their families.
“American-born children were the advent of legitimacy,” wrote Brandon Shimoda, of the way citizenship changes status inside immigrant families.
My only sibling—a younger sister—was born in Madison, Wisconsin. By the time Ceaușescu’s dictatorship released me for family reunification, my parents had moved to Alabama.
I have never been to Madison, Wisconsin.
“It was very hard,” my mother says, flipping through the Sears album with the word photos inscribed across the maroon fake leather cover in cheap gold foil.
In one photo, my mother sits on a faded yellow blanket with a baby under a tree. She points at the slender knee balancing the baby.
“The mosquitos are terrible in Wisconsin,” she says.
She says this because mosquitos love me. As they love her. As they ignore the flesh of every human within a hundred-foot radius in order to feast on us.
Something in our blood excites them.
We are magnets for mosquitos—there I go again, living in We—talking as if she couldn’t be dead.
There I go again, ignoring what else our blood shares: the secret blood-clotting factor that killed her.