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@AshRobertson20

Nov 10

Gilman reads ‘See How Little’ as tinged with homoeroticism, and says that the Yiddish speaking reader would have instantly thought of ‘male limb’ with the ‘אבר’ used for limb here. And while yes, it can be a euphemism, I think there is something working on a few levels. #Yiddish

There is likely a bit of a physical union, shades of the existence of the shechinah, or dwelling of God between a man and wife — but also perhaps a fraternal spiritual/intellectual union of minds.

Gilman seems to reach a little, though, when he suggests there is a kind of ‘impregnation’ going on on that front.

On the other hand, we’ve got ploughed fields for planting, birth images...

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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

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.

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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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