Bialik: caught in a world whose God is dead

January 18, 2006 That there is nothing as whole as a cleft heart is an axiom attributed to the Chassidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk. It is a pithy saying. And if self-division is indeed the native and indelible mark of the Jewish soul, Bialik, torn and seared by antimonies throughout his life, is perhaps its greatest modern expositor.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, the major poet of the Hebrew renaissance, was also the poet of its most radical conflicts. Exile and return, past and present, the private springs of creative contemplation and the exigencies and demands of public life, the transcendent and the natural, sacred and sexual love, the losing and the finding of the self – such contraries and dualities imprint their ambivalences of love and hate upon every word he wrote, and find rich and striking expression both in shorter lyrics and in the great epic myths which they unify and inform.

He was born in 1873 in a Ukrainian village, the son of an indigent and scholarly lumber merchant’s clerk who, when Bialik was six years old, left his native village to find a meagre livelihood as a tavern keeper in the provincial town of Zhitomir. The father died a year later leaving his widow penniless, and the boy was sent to his grandfather in whose home he received a sternly and intractably orthodox upbringing, against the monastic stringencies and rigours of which he deeply rebelled. Steeped in traditional Jewish learning but already non-conformist, he was permitted at the age of 15 to enter the renowned Yeshiva of Volozhin where he hoped to find a via media between orthodoxy and the new opening up of the Jewish mind to the forces of the Enlightenment.

The period of his life as a student brought to a crisis the conflict between the old and the new, between the yeshiva student and the poet, between faith and agnosticism, and ended with his departure for Odessa where he became a devoted disciple of Achad Ha’am, spokesman and prophet of the Jewish national revival. With the latter he conceived of the return to Zion as the means whereby the Jewish people would recover and renew its ancient spiritual freedom and energy. In Odessa he read, as voraciously as he had once devoured Hebrew law, legend and history, the Kuzari, Maimonides and Kabbalah. Metropolitan Odessa was, moreover, for Bialik a highway into the secular modern literary world whose languages he did not possess. It was in Odessa that he studied Russian and German and discovered Dostoevski, Gogol, Pushkin and Cervantes (in translation), whose Don Quixote he later himself translated into Hebrew.

He shared Achad Ha’am’s stringent criticism of Jewish apathy and of many of the conflicting and sterile trends in political Zionism of the time; and a considerable number of his poems are searing denunciations, in prophetic vein, of his people’s shortcomings. In 'The City of Slaughter', written after the pogrom of 1903 in Kishinev, he excoriated the victims, rather than the pogromists, for the craven dishonour of their loss of all human dignity; and the poem, vitriolic in its fierce exposure, played a considerable part in the development of a new national will to self-defence.

He returned to Zhitomir for four years, tried his hand at the timber trade, and wrote the bitter ‘Return’. He settled finally in Odessa in 1893. The next twenty years he spent in Odessa among the writers and the publicists of the Hebrew revival, as editor and publisher of the new Hebrew literary journals; and the essays, stories, poems and translations he produced during these years made him the unchallenged leader of the national literary re-awakening. In constant conflict between the claims of public life and the needs of personal creativity, and between the roots of his attachment to the age-long life of Jewish exile and his revulsion against all that was desiccating, humiliating, stifling, narrow and vitiating in that life, he wrote during this period the main bulk of his poetic works.

In 1924 he settled in then mandated Palestine. He threw himself into the collecting and editing of the great Hebrew poets of Spain, and of the legends and homilies of the Aggadah; he took part in the expansion of the Dvir publishing house, and in the foundation of the Hebrew University; but he ceased almost entirely to write poetry until a few years before his death when he produced some of his most moving poems of recollection and recall.

Though by all accounts the father of modern Hebrew poetry, it was not given to Bialik to create at once a new poetic tradition and the taste by which his works could be enjoyed. Unquestionably a ‘modern’, he was not a radical destroyer and recreator of poetic forms. The English-language reader, bred in the modernist, objectivist traditions will respond perhaps with some uneasiness to the older rhetoric of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, of the declarative mode, of the direct statement of feeling and sentiment which have passed into eclipse at the present time. The contemporary young Israeli, on the other hand, is hampered by Bialik’s use of Ashkenazi accenting of Hebrew which imposes a predominantly trochaic or dactylic rhythm upon pronunciation. It was the Sephardi or iambic accent which became dominant in the revived spoken language of the new-old land, and by the late twenties had completely ousted the accentuation of the Yiddish speaking Hebrew poets. Bialik was sadly aware that children in the schools of Eretz Israel would not read his poems in their native rhythm, would not indeed perceive their musicality at all unless taught to do so. He did write one or two poems which were stressed in the Sephardi fashion, but the other was the melody of the song of his life and could not be changed.

It used to be the tradition in Bialik criticism to distinguish between the ‘publicist’ and the personal poems and to regard the former as the essential Bialik. Though these are often powerful in their scathing rhetoric, the whips and scorpions with which he flails the objects of his indignation are now felt to have unduly monopolised attention. Prophetic afflatus, the poetry of public conscience, palls upon today’s individual readers, as does all that is felt to be didactic or programmatic in art. It is the personal Bialik who is admired today, the poet of the inner life, of tension and duality and loss, of ambivalent love-hate for self, people, God and love itself, of the alienated individual’s confrontation with a cosmic emptiness.

And it is in the expression of his private obsessions and nostalgias, in his discovery of death-in-life, and the absence of God, that the modern reader finds a mirror of his own complex contemporary experience .

It is remarkable how many of Bialik’s poems take their rise, even at the level of syntax or diction, from a negation, an absence, an emptiness or deprivation. One of the most powerful is ‘God has not shown me’, a poem which gives an original turn to the notion of life under the aspect of death . No vocation, no craft, no calling can save a man from the desolation of solitariness in a world whose God is dead, and this cosmic orphanhood is perhaps the chief key which unlocks Bialik’s heart .

Bialik’s sense of the lost unity, safety and joy of childhood, the lost “splendour in the grass” of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immorality’ and of infancy as Emerson’s “perpetual Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise” places him firmly within the romantic tradition. ‘Imps of the Sun’ and ‘Winter Songs’ are among the most engaging of these songs of innocence. But on this point some explication is required. It is an historical commonplace that the modern Hebrew cultural clock has lagged behind its European counterparts – Enlightenment, Romanticism, Nationalism – by about one hundred years. So that Bialik’s belated affinity with earlier Romantic poets is not extraordinary. His frequent striking resemblance to the English Lake Poets, however, is. Pushkin, who had absorbed his English contemporaries, may well have been the mediating consciousness between these so distantly separated points, in time and place, on the map of European romanticism; yet it is perhaps less a matter of literary influences than of the common Judaeo-Christian heritage, capable of producing manifold growth and of undergoing multiple transformations. The ancient language of Bialik’s poetry, which he himself did so much to renew, contains within itself the seeds of this perpetually revitalising power. And these archetypes of European romanticism are, many of them, secularised metamorphoses of the symbols of that language.

Not in any strict or rigorous sense a mystic poet, Bialik’s symbolism presses towards the border of that area of spiritual experience which Gershom Scholem has called ‘mystic nostalgia’, and which has been a major component in poetry of the romantic imagination for the last hundred years.

Bialik’s love poems are tense with the anguish of antagonism between nature and spirit, eros and divinity. Where the metaphysical Hebrew poets of Spain resolved by paradox the contraries of love sacred and profane, Bialik is irremediably torn by them. Paradigmatic of this dialectic of the spirit are the two poems – obverse and reverse of the same coin – ‘Alone’ and ‘Take me under your wing’, in which the sheltering dove-wing symbolism alternately the sheltering and suffering Holy Spirit, and an entirely carnal love, and the interinanimation of religious and secular emotion is, appropriately, mediated by verbal allusion to the Song of Songs. ‘Should an angel ask’ explicitly crystallizes the conflict between the fullness of God and the fullness of nature, between the claims of Torah and of eros, both sources of vitality, both self-fulfilling and life-denying.

To translate is to violate, as we all know. Yet it is also to reveal: first a new acquaintance; second a new set of relationships within the kingdom of letters. The passage from language to language is the passage from person to person, from one semantic space to another, from world to world. No world of the mind is sealed hermetically, and it is the translator’s task to find interstices, openings for communication between languages – a two-way process which does not end with the closing of the book in hand. Bialik is especially challenging because he is, in Hebrew, the most resonant of poets. His poetry is drenched not only in the idioms of the Bible but in the stock of familiar usages of the poets of the Enlightenment who immediately preceded him. This provides him with an incomparable means for the production of complex and ironic effects. The gravestone inscription, for instance, in the closing lines of ‘My Father’ is a direct quotation from the first sentence of the book of Job.

But what shall a translator do, who knows well that the canonical translation of that phrase in the Authorised Version of the King James Bible, the most widely read and authoritative version of the Scriptures, is not only far from guaranteed to trigger the relevant association but would also strike the English ear as dissonant and affected. A translator must choose what speaks to him, in English, with just the kind and weight and substance of natural piety with which Bialik regards his father, in Hebrew. It is on such equivalences that he must rely, or on whatever other means, structural, connotative, implicative, he can find to convey the gravamen of his original’s impulse. This is but one of innumerable examples.

I have of course used the authorised translation where I have felt that it was familiar enough to the English ear of today, which possesses a different stockpile of familiar quotations and would not distract with an effect of oddity or outlandishness. Elul for this reason becomes ‘autumn’ thus naturalising the Hebrew month, both rhythmically and emotionally. The connotations of Elul in the Hebrew calendar are lost, of course; but the poem, ‘My father’, is a poem of a European climate and autumnal in a sense proper to that climate. On the other hand I have not attempted to translate a word like Shekinah in ‘Alone’. Dictionary abstractions like “the Divine Presence” or “the indwelling” would be uncouth in a delicate lyric and so the poem must convey its maternal, yearning tenderness through the concept indigenous to a uniquely Jewish sensibility or not at all. Yet I have attempted, in ‘I didn’t win light in a windfall’ to convey something of the extremely complex notion of a profane natural bounty which is contained in the Hebrew idiom me-ha-hefker.

Specific translation problems arise in Bialik because he is a linguistic hybrid. Born and brought up in a small town in the Ukraine, but using no Russian until his late teens; writing poetry in the partly fossilised language of a distant climate, he is curiously a poet of no time and no place. His landscapes are real and mythic at once, rather like the Vitebsk of Chagall though without the whimsicality of Chagall’s fantasy. Rarely specific, the trees and animals which he mentions are not predominantly creatures of the Ukrainian countryside, but of a biblical or Talmudic or altogether imaginary scene. Yet the forests and fields and lumber-yards and tumble-down dwellings of his childhood memories are Ukrainian and are as realistically vivid and concrete as one would expect of a poetic energy as gifted and exuberant as his.

In ‘My mother of blessed memory’ unexpected if niggardly means for the provision of Sabbath candles are miraculously discovered. But what are these prutot from 2nd century Mishnaic Hebrew to become in translation? The folk realism of the poem demands a local authenticity. But which locale? Are these coins to be English tuppence? or even more English ha’porth? or Russian kopecks? or Yiddish groshen? In this case I chose English farthings to be faithful to my English medium, as was Bialik to his Hebrew (not East European) medium, and at the same time to exploit the distance from absolutely present day realities that yesterday’s coinage confers.

An even thornier denotative problem arose in the attempt to translate Bialik’s zappatim, those pitch burners and tar caulkers of Zhitomir, for whose lowly trade no name exists, oddly enough, in the English language. Conversely, his tzafririm, for whom, in something like their Kabbalistic sense there are any number of sprites, goblins, gnomes, trolls, imps and elves, and for their modern (and now benificent) sense dawn winds, breezes and zephyrs, but for the inimitable and volatile Bialik composite of sun-dazzle and wind-quiver and mischief, with intimations both of the natural and the transcendent, there can scarcely be found an equivalent at all.

The reader of these translations who has some knowledge of Hebrew will discover my solutions for himself by comparison with the Hebrew text. Some undoubtedly he will reject; some, I hope, he will relish. The English reader will encounter, as in all translations, a mixture of the exotic and the familiar: the signified of Bialik’s poetry are the human universals, memory, the seasons, light, childhood, death, the mind confronting its existence in an alien universe. It is from these existential universals that the poetry of Bialik derives its power, and in tapping them, finds its affinities and its brotherhood with other poets and other poetries of all times and places. But the universals speak with many voices and each has an inalienable individual accent. English must exert itself to contain Bialik. But is this not the case with every original new poet, who also must be ‘translated’, usually by critics and interpreters, until his work becomes naturalised within the extended frontiers of its own language?

It is a truism that rhythm, “the breath and finer spirit” of poetry, as opposed to imagery, which is anchored in the concrete phenomenal world, is not reproducible. I have indeed not attempted to translate Bialik’s metres ‘literally’, but I have tried to devise a form which would suggest, wherever possible in English, the cadences and style of the original.

Rhyme I have totally eschewed. To rhyme in translation is to fight a losing battle and usually to suffer a double loss – of one language’s happy serendipities, and the other’s plain sense. But other resources of repetition and recurrence are available, syllable, metric, phonetic, syntactic, which can be used to bind the elements of a poem into an integral whole. A poem begins, so to speak, to translate itself when one strikes a rhythm for it, like striking an oil well. Then it flows.

It has been said that blank verse is the great organ voice of English poetry. It is the measure in which the poetic genius of the English language, from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens, has repeatedly found itself; it is ample, flexible, capable of an inexhaustible range of tone and effect and pace. It is a measure which seemed ideally suited to the meditative, recreative first person narrative or descriptive poems in which Bialik, like Wordsworth, explores the growth of a poet’s mind.


Excerpted and reprinted with permission from the translator’s introduction to Chaim Nachman Bialik: Selected Poems, Jerusalem, Dvir Co, 1981.