Den tysk-judiska poeten Nelly Sachs föddes den 10 december 1891 i Berlin. Efter krigsutbrottet lyckades hon fly till Sverige med sin mor. Hon kom att verka i Stockholm fram till sin död den 12 maj 1970 och publicerade samtliga diktsamlingar i exil. Tårarnas poetik är en studie i två delar som syftar kartlägga hela Sachs författarskap. Den första delen undersöker hennes opublicerade verk från tiden i Tyskland och följer henne fram till debutsamlingen In den Wohnungen des Todes (I dödens boningar) som utkom 1947. Den andra delen följer författarskapet fram till dess slut.

SAMMANFATTNING: The dissertation Poetics of Tears: Nelly Sachs’s authorship to In den Wohnungen des Todes inquires into the early literary works of Nelly Sachs, written before the poet’s exile in Sweden. The study is based on an extensive archive research including a complete inventory of Sachs’s early writings, both her poetry and prose, and her scenic poetry and ”Puppenspiele”. Since most of Sachs’s early poems cannot be dated it is hard to reconstruct Sachs’s development as an author during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the study has a ”weak chronology” that tries to recount for the literary development in Sachs. The theoretical inspiration, and as a mean to overcome the problem with reconstructing a precise chronology, is taken from the thematic critique with a focus on larger literary themes. In an appendix the unpublished poetry is listed. The study is divided into three main chapters that each focuses on three different aspects of the ”poetics of tears” that runs through Sachs’s literature. The first chapter ”The origin of tears” deals with Sachs’s early prose. Mainly, three prose texts are analysed: ”Die Apfeltraumallee. Märchen und Legenden”, ”Chelion. Eine Kindheitsgeschichte” and the published collection Legenden und Erzählungen (1921). In these texts it is clear that Sachs establishes a kind of existential menace to her protagonist. The literary mode has a close affinity to fin-de-siècle literature and romantic poetry. The tear becomes a material that connects the human world to the world of the divine, thereby constructing a linkage or a bridge between two existential modes separated by death. The second chapter ”Death and the tears of farewell” investigates the poetry Sachs published in newspapers and magazines. A previous pantheistic view of God is in these works displaced and more palpably Christian references find their way into her poetry. Two cycles, ”Lieder vom Abschied” and ”Die Lieder von den Tränen”, are closely studied. In these the existential menace is reinforced by a political menace. A development of the tear motif is studied. In short, the tear is now no longer solely a silent material connecting the human and the divine, but rather something intermediate that connects humans to each other: in the poetic world of Sachs rises in this period a human community of tears. This phenomenon can be regarded as an early turn of Sachs towards a Jewish identity. The third chapter is entitled ”The silent tears of the victim” and investigates Sachs drafts for her debut In den Wohnungen des Todes. It documents how her previous lyrical style is altered and how the earlier pastoral lyrical landscape is replaced and broken. The dissertation thus ends with an examination of the lyrical metamorphosis of the tear motif in Sachs authorship. It is in many ways the transformation from writing a history of tears, to an attempt to fixate the tears of history before they vanish.