Rose Ausländer, a great poet

Let me introduce Rose Ausländer, one of my favourite poets to you:
She was born in 1901 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of the Austrian Empire, later part of Romania, and now part of the Soviet Ukraine. Her first book appeared in 1939 in Czernowitz, but nearly all copies were destroyed during the war. She lived hidden in a cellar during the Nazi occupation, and managed to survive, as did another poet who was to become important in German literature after the war: Paul Celan. 90% of the large Jewish population of Czernowitz perished. In 1946 she left the Russian-occupied city for the USA, where she lived for several years, and where, for a couple or years, she wrote in English.
Here is one of her poems in both English and how it was originally written: German

The Strangers
Railways bring strangers who disembark
and look lost In their eyes swim
fearful fishes.
They have strange noses sad lips.
No one comes for them
They wait
for the twilight that makes no distinctions
Then they can visit their relatives
in the Milky Way
in the moon’s trough
One plays the mouth-organ -strange melodies
The instrument possesses another scale:
a never-ending succession of solitudes


Die Fremden

Eisenbahnen bringen die Fremden
die aussteigen und sich ratlos umsehen.
In ihren Augen schwimmen
ängstliche Fische.
Sie tragen fremde Nase
traurige Lippen.

Niemand holt sie ab.
Sie warten auf die Dämmerung
die keine Unterschiede macht
dann dĂĽrfen sie ihre Verwandten besuchen
in der Milchstrasse
in den Mulden des Monds.

Einer spielt Mundharmonika –
seltsame Melodien.
Eine andere Tonleiter wohnt
im Instrument:
eine unabhörbare Folge von
Einsamkeiten.