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A few days after his death, the New York Times published a short obituary in honor of the Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992).1 The laconic headline “Poet in Unusual Idiom” accurately summed up a career that spanned most of twentieth century modern Hebrew and Israeli writing, one that encompassed and articulated the various subjects, themes, questions, and polemics that preoccupied modern Hebrew poetry throughout the twentieth century, particularly with regard to language politics.2 Like many writers of his generation , Yeshurun was not a native Hebrew speaker, and his poetry, like theirs, maps not only the linguistic shifts and transformations that occurred within modern Hebrew itself but also the long-standing tension between a “revived” Hebrew vernacular and native, diasporic languages, Yiddish in particular. The Times characterization of Yeshurun as “an Israeli poet who wove Arabic and Yiddish idiom [sic] into a unique and influential form of Hebrew verse” understates the extent to which Yeshurun constantly challenged and subverted Israel’s ethos of monolingualism and rejection of the diaspora (shlilat hagalut) by developing a radically experimental and multilingual poetics. Multilingualism was one of the more prominent features of Yeshurun’s earliest work.3 “Balada shel Miryam hamagdalit uvnah halavan” (“The Ballad of Mary Magdalene and Her White Son”), one of his first major Hebrew poems, featured Yiddish, Russian, and Polish words in Hebrew transliteration.4 A quotation from the Gospel of John, which Yeshurun included in Hebrew translation , added a layer of Greek. In this period, however, multilingual writing in modern Hebrew was hardly exceptional. Many of the canonical writers who emerged in the pre-state period and would later become major national poetic figures—poets like Avraham Shlonsky, Natan Alterman, and Leah Goldberg— Hebrew Remembers Yiddish Avot Yeshurun’s Poetics of Translation adriana x. jacobs 296 A d r i a n a X . J a c o b s frequently incorporated foreign words, to varying degrees, in their own texts, which were discernibly influenced by their native (predominantly western European and Russian) literary cultures. In fact, the linguistic acrobatics that Yeshurun performed in his poems—e.g., multilingualism, neologism, formal hybridity—also characterized Yiddish modernism of the early twentieth century , so arguably a Yiddish poetics or poetic sensibility shaped his very approach to writing Hebrew.5 What distinguished Yeshurun was the extent to which he engaged in these practices, resulting in what some early critics regarded as a “deformation” (more pronounced over time) of the Hebrew language .6 Yeshurun was also one of the few poets who,to quote Michael Gluzman, “declined to participate in the systematic erasure of the past, making the return of the repressed past the leitmotif of his poetic oeuvre.”7 Indeed,Yeshurun sensed early on that Hebrew literature’s fixation on creating an autochthonous national literary culture in Hebrew risked cultural amnesia, and he sought to redress this danger through hybrid and multilingual writing practices, even when doing so increasingly put him at odds with Israeli readers and the Israeli literary establishment.8 Yeshurun’s early poems, including the 1942 collection Al ḥakhmot drakhim (On the Wisdom of Roads), were largely invested in acknowledging and articulating Palestine’s multilingual landscape, and in this context, Yiddish emerged as one of many languages that Yeshurun employed to challenge the hegemony of Hebrew.9 After the Holocaust and the emergence of the State of Israel, an intensified sense of loss, guilt,and betrayal shaped the poet’s use of Yiddish and motivated its increased visibility in his poems. His later work not only thematized the desire to recover, remember, and repair Yiddish but also enacted the tensions and ruptures that had come to characterize the Hebrew-Yiddish relation in his own broken, fragmented, and hybrid poetic language. To this end, Yeshurun not only employed his more overt multilingual strategies but also relied increasingly on translation,and specifically the translation of Yiddish into Hebrew. In the poet’s own words: “‘From my mother I brought a word into Hebrew ,’ I wrote once. Everyone brings a word from his mother . . . to the world, to literature.”10 Although referring broadly to the influence of the past on present writing,Yeshurun’s comments implicate Israeli literature’s entangled relationship with its diasporic past, one further complicated by the fact that Hebrew was not the native language of many of its early writers. For writers like Yeshurun , bringing the mother tongue into Hebrew involved, and even required, an act of translation, and in many...

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