Song of the Yellow Asters by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger

Song of the Yellow Asters by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger. Translated by Carlie Hoffman. World Poetry. 2026.

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger was born in 1924 in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi) and died in 1942 in a forced-labor camp in occupied Ukraine. She was eighteen. We know her name today because of Blütenlese (“gathering blossoms”), the collection of fifty-seven poems she composed between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. The fact that the manuscript’s handwritten pages survived at all – in a cinematic series of handoffs and near-misses that could easily have spelled their destruction or disappearance – is one of history’s inestimable miracles.

The particular tragedy of her premature death – unlike that of Keats, who perished of illness, or Rimbaud, who succumbed to a spirit of renunciation – is that it happened at the hands of other humans. Otherwise, she was much like those prototypical young poets of remarkable promise: like them, she courted a kind of poetic clairvoyance as though it were her birthright. That part was effortless. At the same time, she was extraordinarily devoted to developing her art. How many teens can lay claim to the task of translating poems from French, Yiddish, and Romanian? Meerbaum-Eisinger could. She also experimented with an impressive variety of forms, from the traditional (quatrains, sestets, even quintets and septets, of alternating rhyme) to more amorphous and modern excursions into free verse. The facing-page German in Carlie Hoffman’s new translation of the poems, Song of the Yellow Asters, pulls back the curtain on all of this: even the most desperately monoglot reader (this one included) must recognize the music that arrives on the wings of a sequence like “rauschen,” “erklingt,” “lauschen,” “singt.”

More than music, it’s a uniquely poetic sense of inevitability that links these end rhymes, rauschen (“to rustle,” “to murmur,” “to rush”) and lauschen (“to listen intently”) forming a pair so tempting, compelling, even revelatory that Meerbaum-Eisinger repeats it four different times in the course of her collection. Here, it happens in a poem called “Rain Song,” which begins:

The rain’s proud singing turns to noise,
the sound growing resonate and full.
Even the forest hushes to hear the song
of the flooding skies.

The choices translators make – picking the right words, setting them down in the right order – closely resemble the choices poets make (and the translation of poetry becomes, therefore, doubly poetic). Hoffman herself is a poet, and it’s thanks to this instinct that she typically makes the right moves in managing Meerbaum-Eisinger’s language, in spite of the possibilities those moves preclude. (Just because a poet like Geoffrey Lehman can get away with replicating Rilke’s rhyme schemes in English doesn’t mean that everyone should.) In this stanza, Hoffman dispenses almost entirely with rhyme in favor of a subtler satisfaction: the half rhyme of “noise” and “skies” mirroring the manner in which the poem traverses the entire story of a storm, from its roar (like “a raging herd of hoofbeats”) to the “whisper” of a “stray drop fall[ing] on the roof.”

There’s hardly a poem here that fails to touch on some segment of the natural world. That means the rain, to be sure (which, elsewhere, memorably “spins / Its gray song of longing”), but it also means the trees, the leaves, the grass, the flowers, the streams. In an elegant afterword on Meerbaum-Eisinger’s life and work, Hoffman conjures an indelible image of the young poet and her friends reciting poetry “among beech trees in city parks, eagles floating overhead, lyrics rising toward the ‘chalky clouds’ and into the summer air, fragrant with fir needles and ripening chestnuts.” Such innocence and joy might seem a cruel trick in view of the Holocaust (already lurking in the form of the Jewish ghetto established in Czernowitz), but Meerbaum-Eisinger’s unmannered, intuitive, even visionary poems refuse to forgo their sense of wonder. They have a knack for making the reader disappear in the spell of their author’s attention. In “Late Afternoon,” for instance,

Long shadows fall on the lighted path
and the sun sends her final parting warmth
and the bird’s veiled chirp is
stealing from silence.
People ten paces away
seem to come from different worlds
and you almost want to scold the withered,
rustling leaves for disturbing the sun’s last rays.
You want to hear the violets grow.

Hoffman didn’t get to Meerbaum-Eisinger first, but her translation amounts to the new gold standard: Song of the Yellow Asters isn’t just a version to last, but one that finally promises to introduce new readers to a poet who deserves to be far more widely known.

Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.