Naomi Replansky (b. 1918) was born into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants in the Bronx and now lives in Manhattan with her longtime companion, the writer Eva Kollisch. In 1946, however, she found herself in Santa Monica, a little-published twenty-eight-year-old poet charged with the remarkable task of helping Bertolt Brecht translate some of his poems into English. Brecht had clipped a collection of wartime photographs from magazines and newspapers, and had written pithy quatrains about each. Later published as Kriegsfibel [War Primer] (1955), his still-evocative text-image poems inspired her equally evocative “Epitaph: 1945.” Collected in her first book, Ring Song, in 1952, the poem has a nursery-rhyme simplicity of form that contrasts uncannily with the suffering it registers: it is a haunting marvel of compression.
Replansky worked on an assembly line during the war and afterward earned her living as a computer programmer, in the era of the punched card. She has continued her interest in translation (working on poems and plays by Brecht and other German writers, and also on Yiddish writers including Itzik Manger). In 2012 her Collected Poems was published; it won the 2013 William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America.
My spoon was lifted when the bomb came down
That left no face, no hand, no spoon to hold.
One hundred thousand died in my hometown.
This came to pass before my soup was cold.