An Extended and Thoughtful Commentary: A Review of The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation by David R. Slavitt Johns Hopkins University Press, 88 pp. $15.95

by George Robinson

Abba Eban has written, "Some things in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in Jewish history is too terrible not to have happened." This grim witticism comes to mind every summer when the Ninth of Av falls. Consider the litany of terrible things that have befallen the Jews on this date--expulsion from England, expulsion from Spain, the roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto and, of course, the events that the fast day of Tisha B'Av commemorates, the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

On Tisha B'Av we read the book of Lamentations, or hear it chanted with a uniquely melancholy or nusakh that is only used on this one day of the year. Eikhah, the Hebrew name given the book (taken from its opening word, "How?") is one of the shortest books in the Tanakh, a mere five chapters, one hundred and ten verses. In the face-en-face presentation of David Slavitt's new translation, the English and Hebrew together only take up twenty-six pages, with a fair amount of artfully used white space. By contrast, Slavitt's "meditation" occupies nearly twice as many pages.

The imbalance is hardly unusual. Lamentations is a densely allusive, compact, compressed, sustained scream of agony that has produced much extended and thoughtful commentary. Given its provenance and liturgical associations, Eikhah is, not surprisingly, a book from which commentators and translators have generally shied away.

Lamentations is a text that Christian theologians have traditionally read in terms of the "suffering man" imagery of Chapter Three, seeing it as a precursor of their own faith tradition. In his Surviving Lamentations, a provocative book published last year by the University of Chicago Press, Tod Linafelt argues strenuously against the failure of both Christian and Jewish commentators to fully appreciate the import of the first two chapters, with their female imagery of the devastated city. For Slavitt, however, these debates seem to be entirely beside the point. In his opening essay, the poet is concerned with reconstructing the dreadful history that surrounds the Ninth of Av and worship services of that solemn day, "the worst day of the year," as he calls it.

In starkly poetic language inspired by the Hebrew text itself, Slavitt recounts the myriad brutalities visited upon the Jews in the ancient, medieval and modern worlds. He looks unflinchingly at what seems to him a major contradiction in our worship: "A God who reveals himself in history is easy to fear but difficult to love." There is no answer to this paradox. To his credit, Slavitt doesn't claim to have found one. However, as he dryly notes at the end of the essay, "After the ruin of the Temple, we could never again be surprised--not even by Auschwitz."

Given his almost matter-of-fact acceptance of the unrelieved grimness of this text (he has some pointedly snide comments for those who await the Messiah), it is ironic that Slavitt was drawn to "that masterpiece of grief in my own culture" in a search for balm for his private depressions. But Lamentations fits well with his own preoccupations, too. The terrible reverberations of history in the life of individuals is a theme that Slavitt has explored before to considerable effect, most notably in Eight Longer Poems. And he certainly has ample experience in translating sacred Hebrew texts, having produced notable versions of Psalms and the Twelve Prophets.

The Book of Lamentations more than lives up to expectations. A formally inventive poet in his own right, Slavitt has taken great care to reproduce the difficult acrostics of the first three chapters, substituting the first twenty-two letters of the English alphabet for those of the shorter Hebrew. And he has produced a version of Lamentations that manages to be not only faithful to the structure of the original, respectful of the ashes-and-tears-drenched imagery of the Hebrew, while sacrificing none of the power of the biblical text. He doesn't take a single false step, and a comparison of his translation with that of a more traditional version (I read Slavitt side-by-side with the Soncino and the JTS) is entirely to Slavitt's benefit.

Simply put, David Slavitt's The Book of Lamentations is a masterpiece, obligatory reading for anyone looking for an English-language version of this central text.
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