A Last Ramble and Farewell [Merle Bachman]

--Washed up on the shore of a weekend.  On my island bed, I survey the waves of light on the rooftop opposite my room (that tree taken down a few days ago has left a gap, and light's rushed in to fill it).
I'm content to be on this island for a while.
My cat has picked a spot in the sun, and it's amusing, because it's so bright she has to squint to see, but she doesn't move.  (The proverbial cat!  the proverbial sun!).
Last night I didn't write, not due to laziness but fatigue (and the need to give myself a 'day' off).
Today's my final post for you, and I'm thinking But I didn't write

--about the post-modern poetic elegy (Kristin Prevallet's I, Afterlife:  Essay in Mourning Time, Essay Press 2007;  Akilah Oliver's A Toast in the House of Friends, Coffeehouse Press 2009:  both driven by personal losses, startling, in very different tones of language, a performance of detachment [Prevallet] "vs" Oliver's raw ritual emotion)

--about the Scottish Poetry Library (its motto, by leaves we live, its modest, peaceful building a raft downstream from the tourist frenzy of High Street, Edinburgh; over 30,000 "items of poetry" including an assortment of contemporary Scottish poetry, "unrivalled" in the nation [to quote their delightful newsletter, which seems to be issued quarterly] )

--about "Yiddishland" as a place of origin and return, existing at the stretch of a book and in the imagination (did you know that Yiddish poets internationally in the 'teens and '20s of the last century felt engaged and challenged by modernism?  and, rising to the challenge, published their own manifestoes, their  "little magazines" reflecting the energies of rival factions?) (If you didn't--and you'd like to know more:  shameless shill! -- take a look at my book Recovering 'Yiddishland,' published by Syracuse last year.)

Mikhl Likht translated into Yiddish poems by Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, Gertrude Stein... (and many more).  --I didn't write enough about Likht. 
So, I hope you'll want to read about him. 
--But the most important source, for me, of modern Yiddish poetry translated into English (and the

book that was my own ur-text) is American Yiddish Poetry, collected and edited by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (and translated by them and other translators, too, such as Kathryn Hellerstein; University of California Press, 1986). 
--Even though that source presented only one woman writer (Tussman), and not Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Kadia Molodowsky.  But all have been translated into English and collections of their work exist: please, look at them!  --They are waiting for you to receive them.

I used to dream a lot about the Yiddish poets, especially the ones whose territory was a noisy, chaotic, burgeoning Manhattan; where, as the Yiddish critic Chaver Paver wrote

everywhere, one read out loud for the others: in Cafe Europa, on the steps of Cafe Europa, in the little park nearby, or leaning against a wall, or a streetlamp... In one's chest pocket was always a fresh written story, or a poem, and it wanted to be quickly read for a writer friend, so he could utter his wisdom about it.  And one couldn't wait, grabbed the writer friend on the street, read it on the street
(my translation from his memoir, Gershon in America).

Now, that's a republic of Poetry.  It just happens to be in Yiddish....

*

I've read somewhere that Israelis, seeking to escape the pressures of their environment, would dream about New Zealand:  a kind of Blakean Jerusalem, green and sheep-studded.  (Nowadays, the young people tend to wind up somewhere in India or Thailand, when they're released from the army.)

Of course, I don't live with Israel-level pressures (especially not in Louisville, where the main problem seems to be getting around the streets closed-off for various "Derby"-related events, this week leading up to the race).  But instead of Yiddishland, lately, my dream location is the Isle of Skye... 

--Maybe the similarity is a periodic desire to shed one's cultural identity. 
In Scotland, I never felt the sense of "difference" that I did in Ireland (which made me cling to my Jewishness more, and explore what it meant, in that context).  Maybe it's due to a lack of cultural cleavage along religious lines:  even Scottish Protestants seem to embrace their clan heritage (although Edinburgh's a fairly Anglicized city, and I didn't make it to Glasgow, and I've only spent a few days in the Highlands, particularly on Skye).  --The English didn't subjugate Scotland for as long as they did Ireland...  But regardless of the historical circumstances and the subsequent societal formations, this Yiddish meydele felt an odd sense of connection to the clans, the kilts, the bagpipes.  (Someone's actually published a book claiming a kinship between native Scots and ancient Jewry....  sounds too good to be true!  --Though I do know that the Jewish community in Scotland recently created their own tartan pattern, incorporating a lot of blue and white... )

Did you know that Scotland has three languages?  --English; Scottish Gaelilc; and Scots.  Even though I'd read some Robert Burns, I'd never heard of the modern and contemporary poets who write in the language, not even of Hugh MacDiarmid, a major Scottish writer.  --Herewith a sample from MacDiarmid (courtesy of the SPL newsletter!):

Wunds wi warlds tae swing
Dinna sing sae sweet,
The licht that bends owre a'thing
Is less ta'en up wi't.
[from "Empty Vessel"]

There's a national story woven into this language--and the little I know of it reminds me of what happened with Yiddish, which was also brought from (largely)  a beloved, daily vernacular into a written literature (and within an intensely compressed time period of -- what? -- a hundred years or less, from root to leafing?).

I love the sounds of Yiddish; it feels good to speak, varem, heymish.  But as I discuss in my book, because I am not a native in the language, I don't associate it with the warm, the homey; and the benefit of that is: I don't lay a Yiddishe mamme trip on the language.  I don't pat it on the head.  It's fully capable, in my experience (and as its modernist practitioners believed) of experiment and fracture and daring.

The minus, of course, is:  I miss what a native speaker has absorbed with the Yiddishe mamme's milk:  the sense of the folk-language, still clinging to and scenting its modern recreation.  (Which is not to say that Yiddish poets had to invent a modern language, as Zionist Jews, essentially, had to invent modern Hebrew.)  The poets had to absorb a modern sensibility and find ways to articulate it in Yiddish, which (with some effort) they did...

Perhaps that's why I'm drawn, at times, away from Yiddish toward Scots and Gaelic:  they sound more folksy.  They light up the places in my head where the fairies and the castles have taken up space, since childhood.  --And I love the fact that, when you open to the "out and about" section in my Gaelic phrasebook, under "On the Beach," the questions include: 

Is it going to be snowy?
Beheil e gu bhith a' cur?
Vail e gu vee uh cur

and

Will the wind die down?
An socraich a' ghaoth?
Uhn soc-rich uh gaho?

If I make it back to the Isle of Skye to study Gaelic, you can be sure I'll send you greetings from there. 

*

Thanks so much for reading my ramblings, and allowing me to share these thoughts (random and semi-planned) with you.  I'm on Facebook (and very easy to find: the only Merle Bachman there!) -- so, hope to hear from some of you in cyberspace...

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Merle - I've loved your posts! Thanks!

[Stacey]

Likewise! I'm hoping Merle will agree to come back.
Stacey

[DL]

Nice going. I wish you'd tell us more about Mikhl Likht. Do you know Isaac Rosenfeld's translation of "Prufrock" into Yiddish, and back?

[Evan Siegel]

Dear Merle,

This 'rambling' is new for me. I have read your poems and Yiddishland and now I get to read you using a more intimate cadence, a seemingly spontaneous talking-writing. I like it.

Evan

[Merle]

Thanks so much, y'all!!!
And Stacey, of course I'll come back (whenever it makes sense) (or maybe I can just send you occasional things, as the inspiration strikes).
And David, thanks! And re: that translation: hmmmm, I always thought it was Saul Bellow who did the Prufrock thing (which, I thought, was too mocking of Yiddish!)... I'll have to look up the Rosenfeld one.)
I'm glad Evan likes my talking-writing (and I like that description of it!).
Well -- see you around the cyberspace cafe...
and thanks again to Stacey for giving me this opportunity!!