Rose Ausländer: My Nightingale

My mother was a doe in another time.
Her honey-brown eyes
and her loveliness
survive from that moment.

Here she was –
half an angel and half humankind –
the center was mother.
When I asked her once what she would have wanted to be
she made this answer to me: a nightingale.

Now she is a nightingale.
Every night, night after night, I hear her
in the garden of my sleepless dream.
She is singing the Zion of her ancestors.
She is singing the long-ago Austria.
She is singing the hills and beech-woods
of Bukowina.
My nightingale
sings lullabies to me
night after night
in the garden of my sleepless dream.



Tr. Eaven Boland. Rose Ausländer (1901-1988) came from a traditional Jewish family in Czernowitz and divided her life between the US and Europe (her surname, meaning Foreigner, may seem appropriate but comes from a brief marriage). She returned to the Czernowitz ghetto before the Nazi occupation, and survived. Much of her poetry is elegies for a lost world.