Ruth Netzer: Kaddish to my Parents & other poems
Dear reader,
The Kaddish - I had to look it up - is a Jewish prayer. You might recognize in it pieces of the Our Father, its descendant. The Kaddish appears in several places in Jewish liturgy. When somebody dies, their closest relative must say the Kaddish at the memorial service.
In Kaddish to my Parents & other poems, Ruth Netzer writes about the death of her parents, about her feelings for each of them, her memories. Her metaphors come from her religion. Prayer is a frequent word.
On the last page, I found a list of translators. This explains why the language feels off in most of the poems. Poetry is notoriously hard to translate. The translator has to choose: Stay with the literal meaning? Imitate the rhythm and rhyme? What to do with wordgames and double meanings? Every word counts. A lot is lost in translation. Kaddish to my Parents & other poems lost everything. If there was rhythm, now there is none. If there was depth, all has turned shallow and stale. If there was harmony in the way the words sounded together, it has gone to dissonance. I couldn't connect to any of the poems in this book. I don't know how good the originals are, but the translations are empty. It might do for a bilingual study edition, for readers who know some Hebrew. Alone and like this, Kaddish to my Parents & other poems isn't worth the reading time.
Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran
Kaddish to my Parents & other poems (English edition) by Ruth Netzer
available on Amazon
If you read Hebrew, try to get your hands on the original.
