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Rating: 
Summary: From the Translator's Forward
Review: Bialik was a provincially raised and very matter of fact, earthy,
often vulgar, frequently humorous and scabrous tongued
individual whose poetry in all its great romanticism
is sustained, in the original Hebrew, by a vivid lust
and longing for life in all its full colour. In his translations Bialik was often made
rather more holy than anyone might healthily be in
life and more so than might be healthy for keeping
their verse alive after their death. As Robert Alter
observed: "Because the educators and textbook anthologizers see
Bialik and Tchernichovsky as "national poets", the
pieces they typically choose to present to students
are generally those with obviously national content -
Bialik's hymns of praise to traditional Jewish fortitude and his songs of hope for a rebuilt
homeland... complaints by students about the"official" appearance of the two poets are nearly
universal... particularly in the case of Bialik, personal and national experience are often so
completely fused that it is impossible to make a distinction between the two."
He goes on to describe the resistance he encounters
when trying to introduce Jewish college freshmen with
basic Hebrew to the work of Bialik:"... I collided
with a student at Brandeis who refused to accept one
of Bialik's most warmly sensual love poems for what it
seemed to be. Surely, he argued, a poet like Bialik
wouldn't write about romping with a young girl in a
sunlit field - rather, the girl was the Community of
Israel, her companion was the Divine Spouse, the dark
woods were the Exile, and so forth."
Reader, the present translator's effort was to
convince you that not only was the girl a girl in a
sunlit field, but also that she was pretty, that
Bialik was hot for her and that her hair smelt nice.
Rating:
Summary: An old master for modern times
Review: Don't let the obscure name and the academic packaging put you off, Bialik is a marvelous and accessible poet. Atar Hadari has rendered these poems in a terse, beautiful language that will appeal to the modern ear. Take a look at the excerpt offered on this web site to see just how powerful a poet Bialik was. His "City of the Killings" contains images that might have influenced our current poet of carnage, Cormac McCarthy. Elsewhere in the volume, you will find poems of beauty and longing that match anything being written today.
Rating:
Summary: spirited
Review: Loathe as I am to admit it now that I do know, I have to say that I'd never heard of Hayim Nahman Bialik until Mr. Hadari contacted us. Nor, I suspect, have many of you. This is an injustice, one that Mr. Hadari's translations can hopefully help to right. Hayim (or Chaim) Nahman Bialik is considered the national poet of Israel, even though he died before the state was founded. He is also considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets ever. In fact, one of his achievements was to restore Hebrew as the language of Jewish poetry, rather than the Yiddish that had become more common. Bialik was born in Radi, Russia, and was raised there and in Zhitomir, by a scholarly father and, upon his father's death, by a stern and scholarly grandfather. Upon reaching adulthood he lived off and on in Odessa which, unlike other Russian cities which forbade them, had a sizable population of Jews (including fellow writers like Isaac Babel, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Ahad Ha'am, a Zionist who was one of Bialik's mentors). Bialik worked in business, as a teacher, as an editor, and finally as a publisher. He traveled in Europe and to what was then Palestine. After the Communist Revolution in Russia, when he came under suspicion for his writings, Bialik moved first to Germany and then to Tel Aviv where he was buried after dying in Vienna following an operation in 1934. Over the course of his career he translated Jewish folk tales, wrote Zionist essays and wrote his own poems (though not many after 1916). It was these last that made his name. And it was one specific poem that made him a central figure in the history of Zionism. Living in Czarist Russia, he witnessed at first hand the brutal treatment of the Jewish people. In particular, he visited the city of Kishinev (modern day Chisinau, Moldova) after the 1903 pogrom in which 50 Jews were murdered.Ê Fueled by anger both at what had been done and at the inadequacy of Jewish response, he wrote his greatest poem, the one with which Mr. Hadari begins the collection : City of the Killings (1903). I wish I could find the whole thing on-line because it's unbelievably powerful... From his own comments in the Translator's Note and from Dan Miron's Introduction, it sounds like Mr. Hadari has focussed more on capturing the spirit and the rhythms of the poems, than trying to artificially preserve exact rhymes and wordings : "If a poem is mostly words--and fancy words at that--there's precious little there. What I look for is attack, as Derek Walcott would put it-- it's not enough to know what the word means, though that helps; one needs to also get a sense of the spin on the word--so that if I take liberties with the translation, to take the necessary liberty of translation that results in the flight of the new poem, I must have a sense of the bias of the material; as may be the case in the treatment by the novelist of historical material, or indeed the treatment by a historian of that same material--he uses historical material but it's the bias of his treatment that's interesting, just like the historian's choice of facts determining the portrait; so with the poem, if the feeling charging the words is absent, if the feeling in fact doesn't overwhelm the language, like a current making the touch of the actual line dangerous, there's no poem to prepare--no song that can be rephrased in English; the translator is, finally a harmonizer with the lead vocal; in the prime moments he is reproducing the singer, in the same key, with variations, in another language. That is the problem, to find the same rhythms, near the same sense, and with the right emotional current. If there's no current, how can you possibly begin to raise your voice? Let alone if the words resist comprehension, and the rhythm stutters. " Not knowing the originals, nor any Hebrew, I've no idea how successful he's been in this task, but I do know that Mr. Hadari's translations tap into a rich emotional current and get you to raise your voice. Whether or not it's precisely Bialik's spirit, they're certainly spirited. Mr. Hadari's done a great service by making the poetry of Bialik accessible to the wider audience the great poet deserves.
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