A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent

Epilogue: The Conundrum of the National Poet

139 Epilogue The Conundrum of the National Poet At the beginning of this book, I observed that a common reaction of contemporary Israelis to the subject of my research—the rise of a new, proto-Israeli accent in Hebrew poetry—was to recite a line or two of Bialik’s poem “To the Bird” in an Ashkenazic accent. What does this reaction sign nify ? There are a number of possibilities. One might hear it as an astute res sponse demonstrating an awareness that the contemporary near-perfect convergence of Hebrew poetry with both Israeli poetry and Israeli Hebrew is not to be taken for granted. If contemporary Israeli poetry assumes a “proper” pronunciation for Hebrew, this was not always the case for literary Hebrew even—or especially—for the canonical poetry of Bialik. Or one could hear in this response a simple reflex reaction and a sign of how thoroughly Ashken nazic Hebrew has been purged from the national culture: all but a few mem morials to the sound have been discarded. Or one might hear in it something far more essential to Bialik’s oeuvre than the Ashkenazic sound of his poems, the sound of longing. The unfulfilled desire that is so central to Bialik’s poeti ics and his impatience with his own outdated accent appear now in inverted form as nostalgia. Whatever one’s perception of this reaction, however, its frequency indicates the success of the canonization of Bialik’s poetry and its ubiquity and constancy in the school curriculum. Hebrew speakers remember these lines because they are taught the poem in school—or a fragment of it, or a version of it set to music. And the schools teach Bialik because he is the national poet. His collected works sit on a prominent shelf in the great national bookcase. But why is Bialik the national poet? A tumult of theories could be brought to bear on the question of Bialik’s reign as national poet—aesthetic, ideological, and historical explanations. My essay into questions of poetics and politics and accent guides this inquiry along a narr rower path. Bialik was not the first to be honored as national poet but he was the first upon whom the appellation stuck. Scholars have already pointed to Bialik’s 140 a new sound in hebrew poetry national themes and to Tchernichovsky’s “Hellenic” spirit to explain the critical preference for Bialik (Bar-El 215–216). But Bialik’s failure to adopt the new acc cent is motivation enough to briefly revisit the question of his status as national poet and ask how it is that he retained the role after his accentual-syllabic poems lost their rhythm.1 What does it mean for our understanding of the relat tionship between language, national identity, and literature that Bialik, anointed national poet with the publication of his first collection, continued to hold that position even after the great accent shift in poetry, even after the nat tional literary language parted ways with his poems once and for all? How is it that a writer who in some sense failed to compose in the national language ret tained the title of national poet even as others of his generation, like Tcherni­ chovsky, adopted the new accent? When Bialik and Tchernichovsky began to write, Ashkenazic Hebrew was not a literary language; it was their writing that made a poetic language of the disres spected , common Ashkenazic pronunciation. For a time the careers of these two great figures in Hebrew literature developed in parallel. Bialik was the first to publish accentual-syllabic poems, beginning with “To the Bird.” Tchernichovsky composed several accentual-syllabic poems soon after (in 1893), although the first poem of his to appear in print was not in accentual-syllabic meter. The reco ognition of the two as major Hebrew poets reached a new level with the publicat tion of each one’s first book of poems at the turn of the century.2 Despite their almost simultaneous adoption of a prosody that was new to Hebrew—one that implicated each of them in the Ashkenazic accent in which they composed— they related to the new accent differently from the beginning. Bialik’s attitude toward the new accent could be described as theoretical acceptance and benign neglect, Tchernichovsky’s as initial animosity and eventual adoption. Each poet quickly came to fear with good reason that the oeuvre upon which his reputation rested was vulnerable to the upset of what had been...