Craft: Hilde Domin

Hilde Domin (1912—2006) is the pseudonym of Hilde Palm (née Löwenstein), a major German-Jewish poet who is little known in the United States. There is a new translation by Sarah Kafatou, With My Shadow, of her poems into English.

She changed her name to “Domin,” in honor of the Dominican Republic, which was the only country to accept her and her husband when they were forced to leave Nazi Germany (and then Fascist Italy). They desperately tried to get visas to four other countries: the United States, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, but none of them would admit them.

Hilde Domin, “hand in hand with language until the end”

When Domin was living for 12 years in the Dominican Republic she became familiar with Italian and Spanish modernism, which were distinct from each other and also from modernism in the United States.