Translating a Tradition
The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself.
Edited By Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, And Ezra Spicehandler.
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 220 pp. $5.75.
As the language of the Zionist revival, Hebrew was meant to function as a kind of Jewish Esperanto. Not quite a living language, it was not quite a dead one either. More or less accessible to everyone within the pale of Jewish consciousness, it had been expressly adopted by writers in the Diaspora to affirm their sense of solidarity with the historical community which was Israel. Thus, unlike Esperanto, it was anything but synthetic; rich in associations that flowed into it from millennia of usage, it promised to unite communities dispersed in space while forging a link with the reaches of historical time.
The irony of the modern Hebrew revival, like the irony of Zionism itself, is that even as it joined, it also sundered. Zionism achieved a local habitation and a name, not for the metaphysical eternity of Israel but for the time-bound, space-bound state of Israel. Having been a language men chose to be theirs, Hebrew now imposed itself as the mother tongue of a society, and came to be bound up in the experience of Israel as the experience of Israel is bound up in it. The result is that its contemporary literature is almost as remote to foreigners who can read Hebrew as to those who cannot.
This insularization of Israeli writing has been intensified by the fact that its greatest strength, like that of modern Hebrew literature as a whole, lies in its poetry, and poetry is proverbially “what is lost in translation.” Hebrew verse, moreover, presents special problems for a translator. From the beginning, modern Hebrew poets have emulated European models, and the magic of their verse stems in part from the play of old against new, from the tension between the habits of the language and the demands of its adaptation to new forms and feelings. Much of the power of modern Hebrew literature has, in fact, grown out of a peculiarly harsh struggle with language itself. Both magic and power tend to be lost in translation.
As a result, modern Hebrew literature has been one of those remote kingdoms of the spirit whose fabulous creatures have often been described but never quite seen. They tell of Bialik, the master, with his passionate sense of history and his sensitivity to the pangs of existence; of Tchernichowsky, with his affinity to nature, his masculinity, his yea-saying to life and the world. Yet Bialik, translated, has read like a minor Victorian afflicted with self-pity, and Tchernichowsky like a weak version of the mountain-loving Shelley or the womanizing Goethe.
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The editors of The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself have tried to make modern Hebrew verse both intelligible and audible to an English-speaking audience. Stanley Burnshaw, who is also the editor of The Poem Itself (1960), believes it impossible to sever sense from sound in poetry. Poetry is “that which is lost in translation” because it lies in the closely welded unity of word, image, and idea. Burnshaw therefore tries to give us “the poem itself.” His anthologies supply poems in “the original” accompanied by 1) a transliteration; 2) a literal translation, retaining the word order of the original; and 3) a commentary. The commentary provides the associations called up by words and images in the original, explaining the quality of sound, analyzing metric and “sonal” effects, and filling in the historical, literary, or biographical information needed to apprehend the “poem itself.” In Robert Frost's phrase, the poem is “discussed into English.” It is hoped that the reader who does not know Hebrew will “hear” the poem by sounding out its syllables, while pondering its paraphrasable and extra-paraphrasable meanings, projecting at each moment what he takes to be sense onto what he takes to be the sound.
It is an ingenious idea, and one not altogether alien to the nature of poetry. All poetry involves communication of a state of being from a speaker to an auditor. The auditor, who normally lives inside his own skin, must be made to enter into another man's play of consciousness. The formal peculiarities of verse—its heightened language, its rhythmic patterning, its metric lull and jolt—are partly intended to startle us out of ourselves and drive us into participation in another's experience. Hence, all poetry involves play-acting. When we fully read a poem, we adopt another's stance, momentarily entering into his affective posture.
The Poem Itself merely carries the element of imposture a step beyond its natural limits. It tries to enable us to project empathy across the sound barrier of language by uttering nonsense and by mimicking not the affective postures of the poet but those of a third person who usurps the poet's stance in order to make it our own. The system is kin to those music appreciation lectures that drown the ear in exposition even as the music, rendered inaudible, hums on in the background—except that here the music is designed for the deaf. If my experience of the one Russian text in The Poem Itself is typical, the effect of the system on the reader who does not know Hebrew will be catastrophic. One cannot mate sound with sense when one hasn't the faintest notion of the syntactic structure of a language, and absolutely no feeling for the associations of its words.
It should be immediately added, however, that this approach is extremely useful if one knows enough Hebrew to grope his way into the syntactic and substantive movement of the poems themselves. And those who do not know the language can learn a good deal about Hebrew poetry once they abandon the pretense of penetrating to “the poem itself.” The prose translations bring images and ideas clearly into focus; the commentaries are excellent; the historical survey is ample, though inelegant. Altogether, it provides an epitome of the entire tradition of modern Hebrew poetry since 1890 in a form that renders it legible, if not audible, to the general reader. One becomes aware of individualities in poems and poets, then of the sharp demarcations among the generations and schools of poets, and finally of the underlying unity of the entire tradition.
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At the outset, there is the immediacy of Bialik's work, with its direct designs on our feelings, its vividly clear imagery, and its grace-notes of whimsy: Bialik is probably not a “great” poet as Rilke or Yeats is great, but he is a remarkable one—brilliant, imaginative, and honestly committed to massive themes of pathos and prophecy. Then there is the disoriented, riddle-posing, self-pitying inwardness of Bialik's younger contemporaries, like Fichman and Steinberg, whose mystique of night, loneliness, and the soul both dramatizes and obscures personality. And there is Tchernichowsky, who forged a secular Hebrew to articulate his vigorous, world-loving and world-suffering feeling for the stars above the Crimea and Canaan alike.
Yet, for all their particular differences, Bialik and Tchernichowsky were both Russian Jews and men of the 19th century, flung into the unsettling modernity of their times. Both sought desperately to find a way to tie themselves to the past and to assure their future; both led exemplary lives in which their personal quest was a matter of grave public interest. Like Wordsworth or Whitman, they thought of themselves as spokesmen of a community that, at its best, shared their values and needed their vision.
This is not true of the “Palestinian” poets, who made up the following generation of writers. Born in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century, they emigrated to Palestine in the 20's and came to the fore in the 30's. This generation bears the mark of their century, implicated in its spiritual vagaries, committed to its self-conscious, symbol-laden, “modernist” virtuosity. Yet Greenberg, Alterman, Shlonsky, Ratosh, and their peers also stand apart from the Symbolists, Expressionists, and Surrealists they emulate. Their exulting despair, their defiant prayerfulness arise out of an apocalyptic impulse; they combine the messianic vision of the pioneer with the torment of the isolated individual who has broken away from the old loyalties and conflicts of the synagogue and shtetl. Yet some traditional frames of reference survive. There is still a sense of being absorbed into a communal endeavor, of being unable (or unwilling) to cast loose from the community's vision of struggle, death, dissolution, and hope of rebirth. “Dress me, good [pious] mother, in a glorious coat of many colors,/And with dawn lead me to toil,” Shlonsky prays. And Greenberg incants: “Like chapters of prophecy, my days burn in all the revelations,/My body among them like a lump of metal to be forged./And over me stands my God the blacksmith and hammers with might.”
The next generation—the Israeli generation—has slipped these moorings. Its members are writers of the mid-century, closer to their European and American contemporaries than their elders could have been. They tend to be “existentialist” in orientation, unapocalyptic—even anti-apocalyptic—in sensibility, dryly lyric in tone, and disjunctive in idiom. Concerned with the immediate nuances of experience, they abandon the large effect and the sweeping gesture. Their relentless craftsmanship bespeaks an admiration for Rilke, Eliot, Auden, and the French Symbolists. But their world-weariness, their preoccupation with the blank world of creeping bureaucratization, their sense of the mechanization of experience (even the nightmare, once harbinger of surreal transcendence, is seen as mechanical), and their vaunted cynicism at the betrayal of expectation, personal and historical—all of this calls to mind the ravished innocence of the Beat scene. Their remote, ironic poems of lost worlds of childhood, the broken communion of love, the ghostly horrors of the wasteland outside windows in rooms where people chatter and the poet bears silent witness, are meant to express the outrage of those who expected more, who demanded better of life. It is almost as though expectation had been the center of their existence, and its loss an ineffable nightmare.
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The flamboyant emotionalism Hebrew writing once shared with Yiddish letters has vanished; so have strong ideological commitments and group identifications. Current Israeli writing celebrates its emancipation from “Zionism,” it boasts of its concern with “universality” and with “individuality.”
But the quest for individuality often leads to group non-conformity, and “universality” is often merely another term for abstractness. Goethe preached individuality, but Shakespeare's Hamlet is a far more richly distinctive person than Goethe's Faust. Much Israeli poetry, for all the precision of its imagery and its deftness of language, is highly abstract—abstracted, that is, from the immediate circumstances of experience. Lacking clear references in space and time, it rarely manages to define the objects of desire and hence to specify the desires that grieve the poets.
The strength of much current writing in the West comes, of course, from just this effort to explore a certain poignant vagueness at the heart of modern experience. Presumably the poets of contemporary Israel have adopted this subject not because they have willfully fallen prey to foreign influences but because the quality of their experience has come to approximate that of intellectual life elsewhere. The old sense of historical continuity has been lost. So has the Zionist struggle to overcome the alienation and disorientation that once made luftmenschen of Jews. Instead of striving to belong to the community that the tradition has struggled to create, the Israeli writer more easily feels himself part of the seemingly universal malaise.
But though he rarely affirms the traditional values of either Judaism or Zionism, his work discloses some suggestions of an underlying continuity with the past. Every generation of Hebrew writers has rebelled against its elders, only to inherit some of the things it rebelled against. Today, even in those writers like the “Canaanites,” who have divorced themselves from both Judaism and Zionism, one finds lurking in the background of their consciousness the long vistas of the past, especially the biblical and pre-biblical past; or the holocaust; or the experience of bureaucratization within a state that arose out of massive human and ideological assertions. Thus, one has the sense that Israeli alienation, unlike that of our disaffected poets, is alienation from something—something that has not been completely emptied of meaning.
Still, it is difficult to define the elements that make for continuity. Obviously, there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about much of the work in this volume. Nor is there anything blatantly “Israeli.” It is, in fact, almost as hard to say what is Israeli about Israeli verse as it is to define the Israeli quality of its art—with the difference, of course, that the very language and technique of Hebrew verse provide a distinctive medium of expression, as paint and canvas never do. In such a dilemma good anthologies (whatever their pretensions) come as a blessing, since they absolve one of the work of definition by provisionally embodying the tradition itself.
