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@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.

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@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 —

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@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.

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@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…

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@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.

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@AshRobertson20

Oct 26

Charney connects this poem to his earlier ‘Redemption Comedy’, saying it could be a coda. And it could (2nd excerpt.) Here is the real redeemer in contrast to the false redeemer of the previous poem — roughly the plot of Leivick’s Golem plays, reduced to two poems. #yiddish

I would argue, in light of Horn, that if you work with the idea that in the two Golem plays Leivick acknowledges a belief in the concept of two Moshiachs, Ben Yosef and Ben David — then as a revolutionary…

He might have initially counted himself as part of an artificial, ultimately unsuccessful ‘Ben Yosef’ — like, say, the golem is created to be in the first play and who ultimately replaces both Moshiachs in the second play…

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