Article
Keeping in the difficulty
January 18, 2006
Avoth Yeshurun, in the wide majority among Hebrew poets, assumed a language. A mother tongue, technically, was Yiddish. Yiddish, among the Jews of Eastern Europe, was always and quite literally mamaloshen, the language in which one first learned to speak: ‘Mamma.’
Geographically, politically perhaps, Yeshurun also owed allegiance to the Polish of the state schools, the Polish idiom and abuse from the tavern door, the Polish of the printed text and the newspaper. Child of a people of small tradesmen, his lexigraphic world also swallowed up bits of other languages: Russian, the Hungarian of the wine dealers, German words from the books of the Hebrew Enlightenment – the Haskala movement in Hebrew literature, which consciously and ambitiously sought the knowledge of the nations: the secular Other.
The pungent thingness of objects in Avoth Yeshurun’s poetry keeps its loyalty to Yiddish. Hebrew seems not nearly so weighted in the naming of objects. A clearer, sharper, harsher light lent things in the world of biblical literature their proper perspective. They were disposed in a real and native landscape, they held shadow potential, and their colors blurred into the soft full spectrum of gray as the light from above of the great luminary descended. There, objects were tools or incidents in the lives and hands of the heroes.
Yiddish tends to animate objects, they are fewer and seem more basic; they belong, like the hump to the hunchback. Weighted for life, they can speak out, imply, implore, command, direct. The linguistic anatomy of things, metaphorical in most languages, in Yiddish is factual. The eye of the needle or buttonhole, the leg of a chair and the face of a table or watch, laces, a buckle, nails and nail parings, a door, a window, a roof, the clod from a turned field or the stone, the cloud between you and the moon; what is near becomes relevant in its intimacy. Things in the shtetl world of Yiddish tend to couple: bed and back, backside and bench, money and pocket, hammer and hand. Their hold is a life hold. For better or worse, one defends what one is close to. “He who loves his watch,” Yeshurun’s poet-lover writes, “loves to see the hour how much.”
Avoth Yeshurun is loyal also to the intonation and gesturing of his mother tongue. Yiddish is anarchistic. A non-inflected language, it assumes the privileges of Latin and classical Greek. Word order is by disposition and by impulse. Words themselves are handled like familiar objects, disposed in the sentence like raisins in a sweet kugl or carp, or like rough-ground pepper in a fiery kugl or carp.
Yeshurun carries over the feel of Yiddish into his Hebrew. He doesn’t ask, he takes the new language in his hands. The mouth is pried open, as the mouth of a child in the hands of a doctor who knows what’s good for the child more than the child can. When Avoth Yeshurun writes, “Fifteen there are million Jews graphomaniacs./ Writer there is one,” the syntax is decisive. Grammatical alternatives are held down, brutally, as a boy drowns a cat, and purposefully.
4
Arabic is incorporated as well, taken over whole. The word or phrase becomes an object. The Bedouin woman coming over the hill cannot speak Hebrew, neither biblical Hebrew nor Avoth Yeshurun’s familiarized, battered, homely Yiddish-Hebrew. She speaks Bedoui-speak – just as the camel speaks camel and cannot be made into a giant humpbacked Polish sheep dog of attenuated neck.
Avoth Yeshurun’s first book of poems, On the Wisdom of Roads, published in Tel Aviv under his first name, Yechiel Perlmutter, was a tribute to the desert people. Almost anthropological in focus, the poet leaves behind his ‘I’ and enters desert paths on desert terms, with Hebrew as his medium, perhaps for the first time in modern Hebrew poetry. The musicality is camel walk, and goat bell, a jingle of beaten silver at the fringe of a robe, a slurp of well water and yowl at night of the jackal. The language is of the Bible, often with allusions to that pre-dispersion nomadic state of the ur-fathers, but freshly shorn, sent out naked like a lamb to Azazel.
Perlmutter’s heroes and heroines are Eldin of the scorpion mustache, Chalima of the sharp retort, Mohánenah waiting for his mother, Nahima with her lover on the limping three-legged couch, and the patient native camels, “always stretch-necked.” The Arab was part of the scene, and the young Perlmutter rubbed shoulder and smells, felt the attraction to that strangest of worlds, and the inherited weight of his essential disparity. If he was to love the Land entire, he was to love as well the Arab woman, and made her his song.
5
The adopted name came at about the time of the founding of the State of Israel. It was really the third change, for the diminutive Chi’el of his childhood took on the Sephardic accent when he touched land at Haifa and was re-born Yechi-el. Now the change was to be self-wrought, adopted, willed. The name – in literal translation, “the fathers are looking (at us)” – would be his blazon.
The initial shock of these young settlers from Poland and Russia at the white dunes, the enamel blue of the summer sky, the olive trees, pomegranates, wild grapes, palms, almonds, figs and carobs, to Mediterranean noon behind peeling, painted slat shutters, Little Tel Aviv and the early communes, road work or competition with the Arab laborer in the orange groves, can best be felt in those now-classic watercolors of the 1920s . . .
Municipal history can be read in the gradual transformation of Avoth Yeshurun’s quatrain. Perlmutter’s rimed, fresh-limed, symmetrical house (the word for house and stanza is identical in Hebrew) little by little crumples with the salt’s bite, with the humidity, with the constant baking under a methodical sun, with eventual exhaust fumes from city buses, and Levantine indulgence.
The quatrain spills, opens, takes in prose, dialogue, grows asymmetrical – top-heavy or sagging. It is undermined, extended, the roof is built on, television antennae poke out unselfconsciously. As do the city’s signs and billboards, newspapers and libraries and theaters, speak in all languages (the waiter speaks seven, the laundress speaks five), so does Yeshurun’s quatrain.
Coda
But can one defend his Hebrew through English? Ten years ago it would have been wild even to consider the notion of translation. But what has happened in English poetry these last years has made the way somewhat easier.
Beyond that, the reader of translated poetry today approaches it much the way the translator himself approaches his work. One reads to find what is new, what is advanced in poetic thinking – much the way Robert Lowell approached his first Montale versions about 1959 in Boston, or the way Michel Deguy went further back, to Gongora, during his sojourn in Spain about the same time.
For poetic technique is poetic wisdom, and Avoth Yeshurun would be delighted at the idea of young New Yorkers, Californians or graduate-student poets in walled Chester reading him to get smart.
“Tel Aviv is the holy city,” he writes, placing it on the poetic map. Translators usually aim their arrow at something like ‘faithfulness,’ without going so far as to appear ‘slavish’ – a little like a Latin husband. I have taken over Yeshurun’s own words (humbling) as my motto: “parrot paraphrase by precept.” That is, admiring the poetry, I have felt inclined to take it whole. I have never glossed the odd or excised the difficult. I have tried to keep the difficulty (a closeness of thinking, or poetic argument, I have discovered) in.
Harold Schimmel, Jerusalem 5739/1979. Excerpted from: Avoth Yeshurun, The Syrian African Rift. Translated and with a forward by Harold Schimmel. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America 5740/1980.
In this excerpt from the foreword to the English edition of The Syrian African Rift, Harold Schimmel talks about the different languages that are incorporated in Yeshurun’s poetry, and of the importance, for a translator, of “taking it whole”. “Words themselves are handled like familiar objects, disposed in the sentence like raisins in a sweet kugl or carp.”
3Avoth Yeshurun, in the wide majority among Hebrew poets, assumed a language. A mother tongue, technically, was Yiddish. Yiddish, among the Jews of Eastern Europe, was always and quite literally mamaloshen, the language in which one first learned to speak: ‘Mamma.’
Geographically, politically perhaps, Yeshurun also owed allegiance to the Polish of the state schools, the Polish idiom and abuse from the tavern door, the Polish of the printed text and the newspaper. Child of a people of small tradesmen, his lexigraphic world also swallowed up bits of other languages: Russian, the Hungarian of the wine dealers, German words from the books of the Hebrew Enlightenment – the Haskala movement in Hebrew literature, which consciously and ambitiously sought the knowledge of the nations: the secular Other.
The pungent thingness of objects in Avoth Yeshurun’s poetry keeps its loyalty to Yiddish. Hebrew seems not nearly so weighted in the naming of objects. A clearer, sharper, harsher light lent things in the world of biblical literature their proper perspective. They were disposed in a real and native landscape, they held shadow potential, and their colors blurred into the soft full spectrum of gray as the light from above of the great luminary descended. There, objects were tools or incidents in the lives and hands of the heroes.
Yiddish tends to animate objects, they are fewer and seem more basic; they belong, like the hump to the hunchback. Weighted for life, they can speak out, imply, implore, command, direct. The linguistic anatomy of things, metaphorical in most languages, in Yiddish is factual. The eye of the needle or buttonhole, the leg of a chair and the face of a table or watch, laces, a buckle, nails and nail parings, a door, a window, a roof, the clod from a turned field or the stone, the cloud between you and the moon; what is near becomes relevant in its intimacy. Things in the shtetl world of Yiddish tend to couple: bed and back, backside and bench, money and pocket, hammer and hand. Their hold is a life hold. For better or worse, one defends what one is close to. “He who loves his watch,” Yeshurun’s poet-lover writes, “loves to see the hour how much.”
Avoth Yeshurun is loyal also to the intonation and gesturing of his mother tongue. Yiddish is anarchistic. A non-inflected language, it assumes the privileges of Latin and classical Greek. Word order is by disposition and by impulse. Words themselves are handled like familiar objects, disposed in the sentence like raisins in a sweet kugl or carp, or like rough-ground pepper in a fiery kugl or carp.
Yeshurun carries over the feel of Yiddish into his Hebrew. He doesn’t ask, he takes the new language in his hands. The mouth is pried open, as the mouth of a child in the hands of a doctor who knows what’s good for the child more than the child can. When Avoth Yeshurun writes, “Fifteen there are million Jews graphomaniacs./ Writer there is one,” the syntax is decisive. Grammatical alternatives are held down, brutally, as a boy drowns a cat, and purposefully.
4
Arabic is incorporated as well, taken over whole. The word or phrase becomes an object. The Bedouin woman coming over the hill cannot speak Hebrew, neither biblical Hebrew nor Avoth Yeshurun’s familiarized, battered, homely Yiddish-Hebrew. She speaks Bedoui-speak – just as the camel speaks camel and cannot be made into a giant humpbacked Polish sheep dog of attenuated neck.
Avoth Yeshurun’s first book of poems, On the Wisdom of Roads, published in Tel Aviv under his first name, Yechiel Perlmutter, was a tribute to the desert people. Almost anthropological in focus, the poet leaves behind his ‘I’ and enters desert paths on desert terms, with Hebrew as his medium, perhaps for the first time in modern Hebrew poetry. The musicality is camel walk, and goat bell, a jingle of beaten silver at the fringe of a robe, a slurp of well water and yowl at night of the jackal. The language is of the Bible, often with allusions to that pre-dispersion nomadic state of the ur-fathers, but freshly shorn, sent out naked like a lamb to Azazel.
Perlmutter’s heroes and heroines are Eldin of the scorpion mustache, Chalima of the sharp retort, Mohánenah waiting for his mother, Nahima with her lover on the limping three-legged couch, and the patient native camels, “always stretch-necked.” The Arab was part of the scene, and the young Perlmutter rubbed shoulder and smells, felt the attraction to that strangest of worlds, and the inherited weight of his essential disparity. If he was to love the Land entire, he was to love as well the Arab woman, and made her his song.
5
The adopted name came at about the time of the founding of the State of Israel. It was really the third change, for the diminutive Chi’el of his childhood took on the Sephardic accent when he touched land at Haifa and was re-born Yechi-el. Now the change was to be self-wrought, adopted, willed. The name – in literal translation, “the fathers are looking (at us)” – would be his blazon.
The initial shock of these young settlers from Poland and Russia at the white dunes, the enamel blue of the summer sky, the olive trees, pomegranates, wild grapes, palms, almonds, figs and carobs, to Mediterranean noon behind peeling, painted slat shutters, Little Tel Aviv and the early communes, road work or competition with the Arab laborer in the orange groves, can best be felt in those now-classic watercolors of the 1920s . . .
Municipal history can be read in the gradual transformation of Avoth Yeshurun’s quatrain. Perlmutter’s rimed, fresh-limed, symmetrical house (the word for house and stanza is identical in Hebrew) little by little crumples with the salt’s bite, with the humidity, with the constant baking under a methodical sun, with eventual exhaust fumes from city buses, and Levantine indulgence.
The quatrain spills, opens, takes in prose, dialogue, grows asymmetrical – top-heavy or sagging. It is undermined, extended, the roof is built on, television antennae poke out unselfconsciously. As do the city’s signs and billboards, newspapers and libraries and theaters, speak in all languages (the waiter speaks seven, the laundress speaks five), so does Yeshurun’s quatrain.
Coda
But can one defend his Hebrew through English? Ten years ago it would have been wild even to consider the notion of translation. But what has happened in English poetry these last years has made the way somewhat easier.
Beyond that, the reader of translated poetry today approaches it much the way the translator himself approaches his work. One reads to find what is new, what is advanced in poetic thinking – much the way Robert Lowell approached his first Montale versions about 1959 in Boston, or the way Michel Deguy went further back, to Gongora, during his sojourn in Spain about the same time.
For poetic technique is poetic wisdom, and Avoth Yeshurun would be delighted at the idea of young New Yorkers, Californians or graduate-student poets in walled Chester reading him to get smart.
“Tel Aviv is the holy city,” he writes, placing it on the poetic map. Translators usually aim their arrow at something like ‘faithfulness,’ without going so far as to appear ‘slavish’ – a little like a Latin husband. I have taken over Yeshurun’s own words (humbling) as my motto: “parrot paraphrase by precept.” That is, admiring the poetry, I have felt inclined to take it whole. I have never glossed the odd or excised the difficult. I have tried to keep the difficulty (a closeness of thinking, or poetic argument, I have discovered) in.
Harold Schimmel, Jerusalem 5739/1979. Excerpted from: Avoth Yeshurun, The Syrian African Rift. Translated and with a forward by Harold Schimmel. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America 5740/1980.
© Harold Schimmel
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère