The Brief Moment Between Assimilationism and Nationalism

Some Hebrew poetry translates well and some fails miserably. In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, the Israeli poet Natan Alterman (1910-1970) was the dominant force in the field for popular readers as well as for Israel’s literary elite. But his greatness is next to impossible to grasp in translation. By contrast, the poems of Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) have prospered in English. Amichai knew English himself and worked closely and affably with his translators. But that’s not all: where Alterman’s verse depends for its effect on lush tonal shifts and astonishingly resourceful end rhymes that defy translation, Amichai’s relies on metaphysical wit and provocative metaphors, much more easily transposed into another language. Then, too, in some cases poets are just unlucky in their translators, or in their timing, and the failure of their verse to thrive outside its original language is less a judgment on them than a comment on the monolingualism of prospective readers.

These thoughts come to mind reading Hillel Halkin’s essay in Mosaic on Yehudah Leib Gordon, undoubtedly the great poet of 19th-century Hebrew literature. As a professor of Hebrew literature, I have periodically tried to teach Gordon’s poems in translation and to convey to my students, even if they find the verse itself prosaic and remote, the extent and the significance of his intellectual influence. I can’t claim a great deal of success in the endeavor, which is why Gordon has always seemed to me to be one of those poets stuck in the category of the highly accomplished but highly unlucky.

This is why the generous selection of poetic passages in Halkin’s essay come as a revelation. Rather than indulging my usual habit of (guiltily) skipping poetic extracts to see what a critic or scholar has to say about them, here I found myself pausing, slowing down, and being drawn into the verse itself. True, given Halkin’s finely-honed sensitivity to language in so many areas of his own writing, one should not be too surprised to find him capable of making Gordon work so brilliantly in English. But the feat is all the more impressive because, like Victorian verse in general, Gordon’s poetry is manifestly didactic. It seeks to identify and ridicule folly and superstition and to hold its readers to a higher standard of reason.