Number 298
Fall 2006

Each of Us Has a Name
SHARON KESSLER
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash

THE SPECTACULAR DIFFERENCE, Selected Poems of Zelda, Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by Marcia Falk, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2004, 288 pages, $26.95 cloth, $18.95 paper, wsupress.wayne.edu.

Once in a rare while a translation comes along that lets the light of the original shine through. Such is The Spectacular Difference, Marcia Falk’s exemplary and long-awaited translation of the Hebrew poet Zelda.
Zelda Schneurson Mishkovsky (1914–1984), known to her readers simply as Zelda, was a unique figure in the Israeli literary landscape. The daughter and granddaughter of prominent Hasidic rabbis, she lived her life as an ultra-Orthodox Jew. Modest and publicity-shy, she nonetheless became one of Israel’s most popular and successful poets, with admirers from all walks of mostly secular Israeli society.
Motivated by a promise she made to the poet, Falk worked on this translation on and off over a period of thirty years. Although I was familiar with Zelda’s poetry in the original, her poems, with their unique connections to the natural and spiritual world, spoke to me anew when I read them again in this beautiful bilingual edition.
The challenges facing a translator of Zelda are many: her erratic punctuation,, eclectic grammar, strange imagery, ambiguous language, and mystical-religious subject matter are discussed in Falk’s introduction. Allusions to Biblical, Rabbinic, and mystical texts are explained in extensive notes at the end of the book. Although many of the allusions to Jewish sources would be easily recognized by the Hebrew reader, many others, quite obscure, would not be. Thus Falk’s notes are invaluable even to those who can read the poems in the original, and her solutions to the problems of translation are seamless and elegant.
Zelda’s poem “Each of Us Has a Name” is a good example of how the translator does not falter in the face of another challenge—that posed by Hebrew gender. Translated literally, the title of Zelda’s poem would be “Every Man Has a Name.” Another possibility, albeit a very awkward one, would be to translate it as “Every Person Has a Name.” The former would grate on the ears of the English reader and slant the poet’s meaning; the latter would lose the music of the original. These problems would be compounded by Zelda’s repetition of the phrase “given to him,” which Falk gracefully avoids in her translation. What is obvious to the Hebrew reader of Zelda’s best-known poem—that the grammatically masculine Hebrew noun ish refers to all people—is captured in Falk’s translation. Here is an excerpt from the poem:

Falk’s solution—to eschew the third-person masculine singular of the original—does the trick here, and it is to the translator’s credit that she is not afraid to alter (very slightly, in this case) a literal meaning for the sake of the English poem.
Zelda’s poems are astonishing for their wild sensuality and awe of the natural world that is seemingly at odds with her Orthodoxy. But there is no real contradiction here: Zelda’s sensuality and sense of awe are rooted in belief. This is a poet who, even in moments of deep despair, never loses faith. Her belief in the power of the natural world to transform the human spirit is just one expression of this faith. In many poems, this sensibility is combined, in unusual and sometimes frightening language, with a mystical-religious fervor. But she also finds joy and magic in the daily and the mundane. So, along with hot winds and seas of ice, angels and the abyss, we also find peach trees, whales, cups, earrings, and a golden fish—no less miraculous in the poet’s eyes than the greatest mysteries of creation. More suggestive than symbolic, the objects in Zelda’s poems take on a spiritual resonance that defies simple interpretation.
The sensuality of these poems often goes hand in hand with intense grief and isolation. Yet even Zelda’s saddest poems contain unusual moments of spiritual and erotic union. The short poem “Strange Plant,” quoted here in full, describes such a moment of ecstatic union in the face of the alienation implicit in the poem’s dualistic categories: male-female (candle and flower), body-soul (heart and grieving face), humanity-nature (the poet herself and the strange plant).

In this union, emphasized by the repetition of “at midnight,” the erotic image of the candle in the heart of the blood-red flower in the first lines is transformed in the last lines along with the poet’s grief: the strange plant’s celebration streams on the poet’s grief-stricken face, but the streaming that we would usually associate with tears is turned to gold, a word that brings us back to the glowing of the candle in the first line.
Zelda never loses sight of the fact that duality and union alike will be obliterated by death. In “Heavy Silence,” another beautifully translated poem and the one from which the book’s title is taken, she writes:

Fire and water, two opposing forces of nature, allude also perhaps to the High Holiday Prayer book, in which a person’s destiny is said to be inscribed on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. During this time it shall be decided “who shall live and who shall die…who shall perish by fire and who by water….” In “Heavy Silence,” a poem rife with allusions, Zelda also calls to mind the naming of the animals in the Biblical creation story, but here even Genesis, symbolic of all beginnings, will be silenced by death, and in fact the very names we have given the animals are used ironically by the poet to silence us:

The poet, for whom words are everything, cannot bear to part from them, although she recognizes their ultimate futility in the face of death. In the final stanza, she turns to God and beseeches:

Even when pleading for guidance from above, it is Zelda’s own inner resources, the strange and contradictory world of her own creation, that guide her in her own search for meaning, and guide the reader on a wonderful journey.

Sharon Kessler is an American poet and translator living in Israel. Her poems have been published in numerous journals in the U.S. and Israel, and her translation-in-progress of the Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg was awarded a 2005 Witter Byner Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute.