The poet Hilde Domin was born Hildegard Löwenstein in Cologne, Germany in 1909. She grew up in a prosperous family, enjoying a rich intellectual and cultural secular life that led her to college in Heidelberg. At university, she became politically aware and joined the Socialist Democratic Party. There, she also met her husband Erwin Palm. They married and, concerned about rising fascism, left Germany in 1931. Moving around Europe for nearly a decade, the couple eventually settled in 1940 in the Dominican Republic. They lived there for over a decade before returning to Europe in 1952, first residing in Spain and then, in 1961, going back to Germany.
Domin took her last name from the island that sheltered her while she was in exile. She describes the Dominican Republic in the poem “Permission to Land” as “a coastline / somewhere to land / one can step ashore there.” She began writing poetry later in life and eventually gained recognition and acclaim in Germany as a poet and translator of literary work. The poems collected in With My Shadow reflect the visions and experiences of a woman contemplating exile and return.
In “Warning,” Domin considers the ways in which the world invites people to find joy, describing “buds / full of sunlight” and a “peeled” open world. But she notes in the final stanza that this is exactly when it is important to be cautious and
kneel down like a child
at the foot of your bed
and pray to want little.
The time when everything invites you in
is the hour
when everything abandons you.
Sometimes Domin us; other times, she reminds us of the world’s silences. Her poems tell of “a mute bird, / that no one hears” and a unicorn “so quiet / you can’t hear it / when it comes, when it goes.” Keenly attuned to such silences and their consequences, Domin recognizes the possibility that all may be lost again. In “Promise to a Dove,” she concludes:
when my house is burnt
when I am cast out again
when I lose everything
I will take you with me,
worm-eaten wooden dove,
because of the gentle sweep
of your one
unbroken
wing.
Pairing the original German with an English translation by Sarah Kafatou, With My Shadow offers a beautiful selection of Domin’s work. Readers who enjoyed Nelly Sachs’s recently translated collection, Flight and Metamorphosis, will delight in their discovery of another Jewish German poet. US English-language readers in particular will see shadows of twentieth-century extremism and exile in their own contemporary landscape. As Domin tragically reminds us:
Exile is never lost
you carry it with you
you slip inside
a folded labyrinth
a desert
it fits in your pocket.
Julie R. Enszer is the author of four poetry collections, including Avowed, and the editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974 – 1989. Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
