Holy Language!

By Sheila Jelen

SELECTED POEMS
By C. N. Bialik
Edited and translated by David Aberbach
184 pages. Overlook TP $17.95

The Hebrew language and the State of Israel have a long and profoundly complicated relationship. And few writers have detailed this bond in as vivid a manner as poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, here transmogrified into English by David Aberbach:

The warriors sleep on, ages pass
But sometimes the desert is sick
Of eternal silence
And rises against its Creator
To avenge its desolation,
To scare him from his holy throne, curse him to his face
And make his world chaos again.
Then the Creator rages,
The sky, discolored, hangs
Like a barrel of white-hot iron
Over the reel desert,
Pouring red anger down,
Charring mountaintops—
And the bitter desert roars and shakes
Its burning hell core and heaven’s roof,
Lion and leopard, storm maddened, race and roar,
Eyes flaming in terror, hair on end,
Whirlwind-swept in stunned flight.

This 1902 poem of national revival, entitled "The Dead of the Desert," embodies the sharp contradictions of early Zionist nationalism. Written in a Hebrew which, for centuries, had been reserved as the language of reverence for God, its call for the mobilization of the dead giants of Jewish history expresses contempt for that very same God. Like this poem, much literature written in Hebrew in the early 20th century sang of popular revolution—in the language of scholarship and religious authority. It was a secular literature largely written by escapees from the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas (or study houses), and it mapped out a century of fascinating contradictions in terms. How could a language that was forcibly kept within the domain of prayer and rabbinic scholarship become the language that would galvanize a nationalistic movement and forge a modern literature in a European mode? How could an elite language become the language of the masses, an archaic language become the language of daily expression, the language of the rabbis become the language of construction workers? Writing in a secular Hebrew poetic idiom at the turn of the twentieth century was a vote in favor of traditional continuity even as it was an attempt to redefine that tradition for modernity.

Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), arguably the first modern national poet of the Jewish people, was born in the Ukraine and became a pivotal figure of the Modern Hebrew Renaissance during his years in Odessa (1900-1921) and Berlin (1921-1924) before moving to Tel Aviv in 1924. Although one of the most versatile writers of his generation, both linguistically and generically, Bialik is best known for the Hebrew poetry he wrote between 1900 and 1911. An acute cultural critic and advocate for the revitalization of Jewish life through recognition and recuperation of its “folk” forms, Bialik wrote a number of seminal essays, and co-edited a massive compendium of legends from the Talmud, many of which are currently available in English translation. He also wrote a number of novellas and collections of children’s poetry and folksongs that are still sung and recited in Israel and throughout the world today. Bialik’s life and career exemplifies the whirlwind period, at the turn of the 20^th century, which marked the rise of Jewish nationalism, the waves of mass Jewish migration from Russia to Palestine and the United States, and the mobilization of the Hebrew language as a key, albeit paradoxical, tool for the secularization of modern Jewish experience.

In C.N. Bialik: Selected Poems David Aberbach presents several of Bialik’s classic epic and lyrical poems, as well as a surprising amount of his lesser-known folk poems in a beautiful bilingual edition. The strength of the collection resides in Aberbach’s introduction and his commentary on the poems—both of which give a wonderful overview of Bialik’s career and his poetic work in the context of Russian-Jewish history. Aberbach’s facility, as a scholar of Modern Hebrew letters, is evident in his concise timeline of Bialik’s career, as well as in his readable glosses on Bialik’s choice of particular forms and particular themes in individual works and in his corpus as a whole.

Although at moments Aberbach’s translations are elegant, in general, I found that he takes too much poetic license. While Aberbach’s instinct is to create a mellifluous English poem on the basis of Bialik’s Hebrew, his translations, at times, seem to be more of a spin-off of Bialik’s poetry than an attempt at fidelity. Aberbach’s dilemma, as the translator of a transitional Hebrew poetic idiom—one that led the way for others into a modern Hebrew, but in and of itself is no longer in use—is perfectly understandable. How is one to capture the flavor of a Hebrew that was giving birth to itself even as it was dying? How is one to capture a language that existed on the cusp of both tradition and modernity, never to be reproduced? Poetry, in particular, poses a great challenge because of its necessary economy of phrase and the weightiness of every word, every image. It seems that Aberbach, in his translation of a selection of Bialik’s poetry opts not to preserve the effect of the dense, repetitive, allusive Hebrew that characterizes—and distinguishes—Bialik’s poetry from that of more contemporary Hebrew writers. Even so, the overall effect of Aberbach’s collection is admirable, particularly for an audience that has no recourse but to read Bialik’s work in English translation. Bialik, in a 1904 poem “After My Death” expresses his resistance to obscurity, and Aberbach’s translations, indeed, forestall that inevitability:

After my death say this for me:
“There was a man who died before his time,
leaving his poetry, the song of his life,
unfinished. And what a shame! He had
another song to sing, and now it’s gone, gone forever!