SARAH KIRSCH was born in 1935 in Limlingerode, Germany, as Ingrid Bernstein, but she changed her first name as a protest to her father’s antisemitism. She studied biology in Halle and literature at the Johannes R. Becher Institute in Leipzig. She lived in East Berlin until 1977, when she moved to West Berlin, and later made her home in the countryside of northern Germany, not far from the Danish border. She was the recipient of many prizes and awards, among them, the following are worth mentioning: the Petrarca-Preis, the Stipendium of Villa Massimo, Rome; the Staatspreis for Europäische Literatur, Austria; and the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis. Her work is considered among the most influential in German literature and it has been translated into several languages. She died on May 5, 2013.

The poems published here, with the permission of the author, were first published in English translation by the poet Eva Bourke, in Sirena: Poetry, Art, and Criticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009:2), founded and edited back then by the editor of The Pasticheur: Literature, Art & Ideas.