After Every War

By. Kaitlyn A.

The fictional novel, After Every War by Twenty-Century Women Poets and translated by Eavan Boland "is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after the war" (Boland).

The nine women that are noticed in the book are Rose Ausländer, Elisabeth Langgässer, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Hilde Domin, and Dagmar Nick. All these women are German speaking, all poets, and all witnesses of probably one of the most horrific and devastating war in history, World War II. Some of these women were also Jewish which meant that they also had to witness and take part in "one of the darkest periods of human cruelty, the Holocaust." (Boland). This book takes you on their journeys with their poems with some other writers included providing a detailed and creative biography of the time period. But the way everything is seen by the poet's eyes is not from them it's from 'the lens of deep private losses' (Boland). They mark down small occasions, or just stuff that goes on between families to keep the readers interested in everything that is going on.

Boland translated this weekend they are introduced with biological notes on the authors to help to reader understand more about who they are reading about/who wrote it. Not only did Boland have to translate the tragic occurrences that happened in the book she was also dealing with the violence in her own country. 'Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are.' (Boland).

This reading was very interesting as it had a lot of facts about the poet's and the way they word their writing makes the poem come to life almost making the emotions real. I strongly suggest readers who are interested in history and what things were like during the war read this book.

After Every War, Twenty-Century Women Poets; translated by Eavan Boland, 2004, 163 pages