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Inheritance
Poetry. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Yiddish by Mary Schulman. Edited by Mary Schulman, Joan Brauman and David Weintraub. This collection brings together in English the work of one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets of the Soviet Union. Suffused with a consciousness of suffering, homelessness, and inevitably, the Holocaust, these modernist poems are meditative, elegiac, and prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement, war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish's Eastern European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and universal. (Includes both the Yiddish and English text).
- GenresPoetry
172 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2007
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November 15, 2018
Peretz Markish has been called "the Yiddish Mayakovsky," which would have been the highest compliment, considering Markish consciously molded both his persona and his poetry off of Mayakovsky. It pains me that Inheritance is the only English translation of his poetry, not because it is bad, but because it does not live up to the work of his idol and the revolutionary fervor of his youth. Instead, the collection draws from his later poetry, which focused on nature and love in the hopes of avoiding the censor's ire (he failed and was shot in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in 1952, along with over a dozen other Yiddish authors and intellectuals).
At his best, Peretz Markish's poetry is modern, angry, innovative, and powerful. Hopefully, this part of his work will find a translator. His great long poem, "The Heap" (Di Kupe) is only partially translated, but here is a sample:
...
..No! heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards
Out of my mouth’s brown streams of pitch
Sob a brown leaven of blood and sawdust.
No! Don’t touch the vomit on the earth’s black thigh.
Away! I stink! Frogs crawl on me!
looking for your mother-father here? Seeking a friend?
We’re here! We’re here, but we taint the air with stink.
away. Leisurely we delouse ourselves, with warped hands, like brass.
From top to bottom a heap of filthy wash.
Claw, crazed wind, at what you want: a child? A bride?
Before you the church sits like a polecat beside a heap of strangled foul.
O tallowed heavens—we are here! We are here! All of us! …
11 Tishrei 5681 [23 Sept, 1920- the day of the Gorodishche pogrom; 216 people were killed]
in god’s name [nomen],
Amen [omen].
At his best, Peretz Markish's poetry is modern, angry, innovative, and powerful. Hopefully, this part of his work will find a translator. His great long poem, "The Heap" (Di Kupe) is only partially translated, but here is a sample:
...
..No! heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards
Out of my mouth’s brown streams of pitch
Sob a brown leaven of blood and sawdust.
No! Don’t touch the vomit on the earth’s black thigh.
Away! I stink! Frogs crawl on me!
looking for your mother-father here? Seeking a friend?
We’re here! We’re here, but we taint the air with stink.
away. Leisurely we delouse ourselves, with warped hands, like brass.
From top to bottom a heap of filthy wash.
Claw, crazed wind, at what you want: a child? A bride?
Before you the church sits like a polecat beside a heap of strangled foul.
O tallowed heavens—we are here! We are here! All of us! …
11 Tishrei 5681 [23 Sept, 1920- the day of the Gorodishche pogrom; 216 people were killed]
in god’s name [nomen],
Amen [omen].
Displaying 1 of 1 review