Peter Cole’s em dash Bialik

That the New York Review of Books should return to Hayim Nahman Bialik at this disturbed political juncture is telling. Bialik’s position as Hebrew literature’s key poet is assured, yet his work continues to provoke, in particular his chronicle in City of Slaughter. Its opposing narratives shift in emphasis. His poetry inhabits a torque between catastrophe and revival, continually drawn into current affairs. The pogroms of Tsarist Russia on the one hand, the forging of Hebrew as a modern literary language on the other, provide its counterweights. By commissioning new translations from Peter Cole – poet, Hebraist, and essayist – NYRB makes Bialik relevant again. Translation is itself a critical act, re-opening questions about poetry, politics and appropriation, about time itself, with its timelessness, as in:

The sea of silence spits out secrets
and all the world around it goes still;
and the roar of the river never ceases
behind the grinding stones of the mill.

Bialik (1873–1934), born in Russian Ukraine, wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish at a time when neither language held secure literary status. His poems avoid the lexicon of sentimentality, attempting to dignify languages struggling towards modern expression. Cole’s translations bring them closer to our own time, against the backdrop of Bialik’s own impact: over 100,000 mourners at his funeral, canonisation in Israel’s curricula, and repeated political invocation. The irony remains that poems of lament, prayers and reflection become, in later hands – as when Netanyahu quotes him – sources of a strange exercise in justification.

Cole’s translations handle ...