The Spectacular Difference: Selected Poems of Zelda (review)

When I sent my Israeli friend a copy of Marcia Falk’s translation of Zelda’s poems, she said she felt like a child with an unexpected birthday present. Indeed, Marcia has given us all a present in her selection and translation of Zelda’s work.

Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson, who wrote under her first name, was born into the Habad dynasty in 1914 in Russia, came to mandatory Palestine with her parents when she was twelve, and spent most of the rest of her life in Jerusalem. Her life was complicated and very difficult, but her poems just kept getting better.

These selections are translated from Zelda’s books Leisure (1967), The Invisible Carmel (1971), Be Not Far (1974), Surely a Mountain, Surely Fire (1977), The Spectacular Difference (1981), and Beyond All Distance (1984). The volume is enriched by sensitive, scholarly introductions to many of the poems, as well as notes at the end of the volume explaining Marcia’s own process and choices as a translator. The notes include frequent learned references to what Marcia, the scholar, understands thoroughly and what Zelda was born and bred to understand—the daily and Holy Day liturgy, rabbinic literature and Jewish mysticism in its various forms through the centuries.

Marcia has remarked that to translate a poem is actually to engage in the act of creating a new poem in another language. I would respond: yes and no. Looking at the translations that have been made of my own poems into three other languages, at times I find that the translator has found the real poem I meant to write—better than I managed to do myself! But this is not what happens in translating a brilliant, transcendent poet like Zelda.

Readers of Nashim know how frustrating English can be to write in. Hebrew is so highly inflected that you can make a poetic gesture with a prefix, a suffix, or especially—a doubling. I came originally from a highly inflected language. Although I now can write only in English, I feel the frustration of it. When one of my translators has excavated the poem l was actually trying to write, it was done by putting it into a language better suited to it. In Latin, in Hebrew, in German, you can put any word anywhere the poetry demands—the grammar will proclaim what “goes with” what. In English you must accomplish this by word placement. I often experience this as a straitjacket.

Marcia demonstrates that even in English, doubling can work.

I lie in my house, and in the distant distance the sea wanders through the dark.

(“I Lie in My House,” The Invisible Carmel, 1971)

Her “new poems” on Zelda’s originals do not always seize this opportunity, however. For example, on page 177 there is the opportunity to say,

And what happened to the sadness? Even in the sadness there is radiance.

(“Ancient Pines,” Surely a Mountain, Surely Fire, 1977)

Instead, she gives us,

And the sadness?! Even there— radiance.

In a poet, laughter born of suffering is often expressed in a gentle, redeeming irony. Marcia, who came to know Zelda in person, knew this—and yet. The actual voice of a particular poet is so difficult to catch; gentle irony, almost impossible. And then to render it in another tongue—well, for example:

When I set free the golden fish the sea laughed and held me close to his open heart, to his streaming heart.

(“Facing the Sea,” Leisure, 1967)

Marcia tells us that she asked Zelda about this golden fish. Zelda complained, “People are always asking me what I meant by something. By a golden fish I meant a golden fish.”

In her wonderful notes at the end of the volume, Marcia very often points out her choices, and gives us the rendering she could have chosen but did not. When she writes, “My peace is tied by a thread / to yours” (“Each...