Tweet

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @AshRobertson20

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 28

More ‘Nature’ — as I said, it’s one I’ve worked on a bit more and here’s the first stanza, pushed into slightly better English shape #Yiddish

And here I move laterally to the poem ‘Tired’ by a contemporary of Leivick’s, Langston Hughes.

Hughes, too, wants to cut nature, in two. Not how it works, not its design, not if there’s some pre-determined order — but why it is rotting from the inside. It’s infected, not divine

@aglaser

@aglaser‘s excellent book, Songs in Dark Times, shows how Leivick teeters on the edge of recognising where he stands as visually, if conditionally, white in America. And he does teeter, even talking in interview about the danger of the whipped becomes the ones who wield the whip.

Read 17 tweets

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 28

‘Nature’ is one of the poems I asked for permission to try publishing a translation of formally. With no response, I prefer not to post too much of a ‘final’ version, with rhyme restored, rather than a partial literal working one for analysis. #Yiddish

Another wrestling with the natural and the divine, where do we come from, where do we go, why and how. Can we only be what we are destined to be? If God is in everything, then where is God in the sanatorium, in death? We foreshadow the pantheism of ‘Spinoza’

A tie here to ‘Darwin’ and ‘Again a Neighbour Died’ where we think about origins and what the purpose of life is. And the terrifying prospect of someone else’s end —

Read 7 tweets

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 28

I think there’s a real sense in Leivick of time/history/fate — if not quite being a flat circle — being helical. One reaches the same juncture, only further down the road. Every sacrifice the first, every murder the first, everything repeating….just displaced in time.

If we jump ahead again to ‘Leaf on an Apple Tree’, Leivick writes from Munich in 1946 (a rarity in that the poem is explicitly dated, from a time when he said he was largely unable to write poetry) having visited Dachau, about the ‘Cain-brotherhood’ of Germany.

The ploughed field returns there, too, in ‘Not There’ — the evidence of murder being ploughed under.

Read 5 tweets

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 27

If we look ahead to ‘A Leaf on an Apple Tree’ again — almost twenty years later — we find Leivick compelled to join in singing about a different kind of belief, with different prisoners — Ani Ma’amin, with the survivors of the Shoah in DP camps. #Yiddish (Con’t)

In fact, the three members of the delegation to the DP camps in 1946 each come away with their own version of ‘Ani Ma’amin.’

Efros, firmly in the Zionist camp, casts Israel as the redemption of the Jewish people.

Read 5 tweets

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 27

We’re setting up for a couple May Day poems.

Leivick doesn’t break fully with the Soviets— and was quite popular in Russia, visiting in 1925— until 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the initial break was in 1929, and the Freyheyt walkout over Hebron) #Yiddish

The May Day poems also continue beyond that point, through ‘In Treblinka bin ikh nit geven’ and there is even in that volume a temporary mending of fences, it seems, with the Soviets when they are anti-Nazi.

For even more in that vein, one can look at Ruth Wisse’s article and the following exchange of letters with Samuel Leivick in the pages of the Jewish Review of Books: jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/98/dr… and jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/154/l…

Read 5 tweets

בלומה

@AshRobertson20

Oct 26

It’s true Leivick wasn’t particularly humble about his writing and seemed to believe he was always destined for something special — though I am getting the impression he was introverted by nature and didn’t necessarily enjoy public speaking. #Yiddish

He seemed to like to take the opportunity to leave — in his prose pieces, he’s quite often slipping out the door and going for a wander. Perhaps it’s more about the fact that he *can* leave and exercises the option in order not to lose it.

He’s also fairly self-effacing about what he considers a ‘bad’ poem in Tsarisher Katorge, where his cellmate asks Leivick if he can translate it for him and he perseverates, saying it’s pretty bad in Yiddish and could only be worse in Russian.

Read 5 tweets

Share this page!

בלומה

People who liked this thread also liked...

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @AshRobertson20

בלומה

בלומה

בלומה

בלומה

בלומה

בלומה

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!