Don’t grow weary
but hold your hand out
quietly
to the miracle
as if to a bird.

— Hilde Domin, from The Wandering Radiance, translated by Mark S. Burrows (April, 2023)

The Poets Corner welcomes Mark S. Burrows to present his newly published volume of poems by the German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin (1909 – 2006), The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin.

What does it mean to live with hospitality towards others?
To go back to a place where we’ve been betrayed and create beauty?
What more daring thing can we do after facing horror and trauma than to make art?
How does our longing for "homeland" bring us hope, even in exile?

Hilde Domin’s life and poetry explores these themes – and in a conversation among Mark Burrows, Chris Nelson, Marion Tauschwitz, and Hilary Davies, we’ll have the opportunity to explore the ways these themes appear in her poetry and remain relevant in our lives.

Domin fled Germany in the early 1930s and spent twenty-two years living as a refugee before discovering her vocation as a poet in exile. She eventually returned to Germany, in 1954, one of the few Jewish artists and intellectuals to do so after the Shoah. Her experience of “coming home in the word,” as she put it, is what led to her return, shaping the deep sense of “homeland” she brought with her. She understood her vocation as a defiant answer to the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s claim that “it would be barbaric to write poems after Auschwitz.”

The Wandering Radiance is a translation project that was more than a decade in the making. During this Zoom session, Burrows introduces this poet described by a recent English literary critic as “a modern classic in Germany, taught in schools and beloved by readers who might not otherwise know much modern poetry.” He is joined by his publisher, Christopher Nelson (of Green Linden Press in Iowa), Marion Tauschwitz (a German writer who was a confidante of Domin’s in her later years and wrote the standard biography of her—as well as the forward for this volume), and the British poet and literary critic Hilary Davies.

Learn more about our guests for The Wandering Radiance here.

This program brought to you in partnership with Mercy By the Sea.