Preface by Gabriel Levin
Haim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) was born in the Ukrainian village of Radi. He began publishing in the 1890s, after moving to Odessa in order to join its Jewish literary circle, and was rapidly hailed—and in time adulated—as the leading poet of the Hebrew national rival movement. In addition to writing, prophet-like, poems of wrath in response to the Russian pogroms of 1903-6, Bialik wrote poems of great lyric intensity, infused with longing and despair, his lonely, brooding voice, speaking, as it were, in the wake of national and personal ruin. Though writing very little verse after 1911, Bialik remained active in the public sphere as a publisher and editor and literary essayist. Leaving the Soviet Union in 1921, thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky, Bialik resided first in Berlin, home to many Jewish émigré writers, before settling in Tel Aviv in 1924.
Davar (Hebrew for 'word,' 'thing,' 'event') is the first of a series of vatic poems written in free verse that approximates to the loose cadences of the Bible's prophetic books. Composed a few weeks after Theodore Herzl's untimely death on July 3, 1904 at the age of 44, the poem can be read at first glance as a vehement denouncement of the factionalism within the Zionist movement at the time - divisions further exacerbated by the death of its leader.
That same year Herzl had been viciously attacked, particularly by the Russian Zionists, for having met in St. Petersburg with the Czar's Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve. Jews in Russia believed that Plehve, an arch-reactionary, bore responsibility for the wave of pogroms that had swept across Russia.
Shortly after the terrible massacre in Kishinev in April 1904, Bialik visited the town and was moved to cry out, in one of his most forceful lyrics, "Cursed be he who cries: Avenge!/Such vengeance of a child's blood Satan hasn't yet devised."
A week after his trip to Russia in 1903, Herzl had attended the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle, and tempers ran high, this time in response to his proposal that Jews establish a colony in Uganda.
Opponents branded him a traitor (Bialik himself squarely sided with the 'anti-territorialists' and was unsparing in his criticism of the Zionist leader), and shortly after the congress a Zionist student tried to assassinate Nordau, one of Herzl's staunchest supporters.
Hopes of a united Zionist front were bleak, to say the least, and it seems possible that Bialik's 'scoundrels,' hoarding the cast-away embers from the altar for their own selfish use, were none other than the leaders of his own people. Be that as it may, 'Word,' which starts out as a public poem of wrath, morphs, in typical Bialik fashion, into its opposite, spiralling inward in its expression of loss, self-recrimination, and anguish ('all is sucked down the void's/windy chamber and lost …') and a little over a century later, the poem reads with uncanny urgency in a country where religious and ideological tensions have not abated.
*
WORD
Scatter the fiery coals of your altar far and wide, prophet,
and leave them to the vile -
to grill their meat and warm their hands
and heat their pots.
Sow to the winds the spark from your heart, let it light up
the gob of tabac in their mouths
and illumine the sneer lurking like a thief under their whiskers
and the malice in their eyes.
Here they go, the scoundrels, and here they come,
with the prayer you taught them on their tongue
aping your pain, hoping your hope - their hearts
gone out for your altar in shambles.
Later they'll swoop down and poke into the heap of rubble,
dragging away its shattered stones to sink
into the floors of their homes and fence their yards,
or set over their tombs.
And should they uncover your charred heart among the debris
they'll toss it to their dogs.
Go on then and boot your altar with a scornful leg -
and dampen its flames and smoke.
With a clean sweep of the hand wipe out
the cobwebs strung into harpstrings in your heart
and weave yourself a song of revival and a vision of salvation,
vain words beguiling the ear -
sow them to the winds, pale tatters adrift in the hollow world
on a clear, late-summer day,
neither silver thread nor web will find its brethren or friend,
cast off to the first autumnal chill;
while your sledgehammer, its iron head crazed from useless blows
on stone hearts, smash and pound it into a spade
to hollow us out a grave.
And whoever puts the wrath of God in your mouth - damn him
and don't twist your lips in fear;
even if your word be bitter as death, be it death itself -
we listened and understood.
Look how copious night engulfs us, gloom crushed,
and we grope like the blind.
Something has come between us and no one knows what,
and no one sees and no one utters
whether the sun has risen for us or set -
and if set for all time.
Vast is the gulf all around and awful all around the chasm
and there is no where to flee.
In whose ear will the dark-throttled cry and prayer
of our entreating ring?
Should we curse and thunder against God -
on whose head will our curses fall?
And should we grind our teeth
on whose crown will our raging fists land?
All sucked down the void's
windy chamber and lost, irrevocably lost.
And there is no support, nor comfort nor road -
and the heavens are silent,
for they know how they've sinned against us, gravely they have
sinned -
mutely bearing the weight of their iniquity.
So go on and open your mouth, prophet of the end of days,
if you have anything to say, speak up!
Even if it is bitter as death, or be it death itself -
speak!
Why should we fear death? His angel is saddled on our shoulders,
his bit chafes in our mouths.
With shouts of revival on our lips, and with playful whoops
we stagger towards the grave.
1904
translated by Gabriel Levin