SOURCE: "Nelly Sachs," in Saturday Review, Vol. XLIX, December 10, 1966, pp. 46-7.

Schwebell is an author and translator. In the following essay, she traces Sachs' poetry career from its beginnings in Sweden, noting the gradual growth of her popularity in Sweden and Germany and its culmination in the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Let us walk together into the future to seek again and again a new beginning; let us try to find the good dream that wants be realized in our hearts." This is Nelly Sachs, who just received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born in 1891, the only child of a well-to-do manufacturer, she grew up in the Tiergartenviertel, the most distinguished neighborhood of Berlin. She studied music and dancing and, at the age of seventeen, started to write poetry—pretty, highly polished verse in the traditional manner. In accordance with her wish, this poetry was not included in...