Chaim Nahman Bialik's Selected Poems

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and the Brilliant Translations by Maurice Samuel

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With a mother's, sister's care,
• And your lap shall be my refuge
And my nest of stifled prayer.

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And v, hen tenderness of twilight
Falls, my pain shall give a sign:
There is youth, they say, to squander--
Where is mine?

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And another secret longing
Burns my spirit like a flame:
There is love, they say, to garner--
Love? Vl'hat is that name?

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By the stars my life was pilfered,
By a dream that died. and see—
Naked now, and empty-handed—
What is left for me?

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Shelter me beneath your pinion
With a mother's, sister's care.
And your lap shall be my refuge
• And lily nest of stifled prayer.

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MAURICE SAMUEL

Reproduction of parallel pages from "Selected Poems . .. Chaim Nahman Bialik." The Hebrew
text "Shelter Me Beneath Your Pinion" and Maurice Samuel's translation,

Two of the most distinguished
Jewish literary giants of our time
are linked in a new volume just
published by the Union of Ameri-
can Hebrew Congregations.

•

One is the author and the other
the translator, and it is the bril-
lance of the translator that makes
a great Hebrew work accessible to
a discriminating audience of Eng-
lish readers.
In this volume, "Selected Poems
by Chaim Nahman Bialik," the
noted translator, Maurice Samuel,
has retained the heart and the
spirit of works that have acquired
favor.
In January of this year, before
his death, Mr. Samuel wrote a
scholarly introduction to this fas-
cinating book. He defined the clas-
sic in literature, and he described
Bialik as "a genius who fitted into
or arose out of his era; he was an
organic part of the last century of
Jewish life."
Mr. Samuel additionally said
that Bialik "was as validly the
modern Jewish and Hebrew ren-
aissance as Yehudah Hales ,' was
the medieval dream. The two
have, Indeed, often been men-
tioned together, because there is
not a third of the same stature In
the intervening span of eight cen-
turies. Further, Bialik's all-too-
few translations of Yehudah Hal-
evi into Yiddish are marvels in
themselves."

As an analysis of Jewish literary
developments, of the influence of
Yiddish and the emergence of He-
brew as a national force, Mr. Sam-
uel's essay serves a very valuable
purpose. He described the writings
of Sholom Aleichem, Mendele Mo-
her Seforim. Isaac Leib Peretz and
others and then stated:
"Bialik, coming later, and more

52 Friere, Nev. 24, 1972

—

gifted than any of his contempor-
aries, overcame the handicaps of
that anomalous situation; namely,
of masses that spoke Yiddish and
the need to find a voice for them
in Hebrew. What one feels most
strongly about Bialik is that he
made Hebrew sound natural when
he sang of the life of the Yiddish-
speaking masses.

"Four poets stand out in the pre-
Israel period — Chaim Nahman
Bialik, Saul Chernihovsky, Zalman
Shnaiur and Jacob Cahan. Among
them, Bialik constitutes a class in
himself. The best of his work rises
from the level of literature into the
kind of inspired utterance for which
there is yet no adequate name. It
was, moreover, the voice of a peo-
ple issuing through a man, to the
enhancement of individuality of
both. It was the anonymous and
the personal in paradoxical and
perfect union. Something like it
may be observed in Heine's 'Lor-
elei,' which only Heine could have
written, but which has become
folklore to such a degree that the
Nazis could not suppress it and,
therefore, had to attribute it to 'an
unknown poet'."

It is in the evaluation of the
poetry of Bialik, and the selections
incorporated in this wonderful
book, that the Samuel essay as-
sumes a very high quality and rep-
resents guidance to students of lie-
brew literature who seek an un-
derstanding of the great gifts in-
herent in the Bialik works.
"Bialik," Mr. Samuel concludes
in the essay defining the genius of
the Hebrew writer, "has often
been called the national poet of
the modern Jewish renaissance.
He was that only in the sense that
he was appropriated by the Zion-
ists as the most inspired spokes-

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

man of the ideal of a Jewish
all the period of its existence."
homeland. In another sense he
The selection of poems for this
was much more than a national valuable collection was also done
poet: he was as universal as with wisdom. Included is the fa-
Shakespeare and Goethe- His Zion- mous "The City of Slaughter,"
Jam was not a 'viewpoint' or a which was inspired after the pog-
'conviction'; It was implicit in his roms in the early years of this cen-
Jewish being. If the word 'nation- tury. The equally inspired "Ha-
al' can be applied to him at all, Masmid"
(The Scholar), "The
it would have to refer to the Jew- Dead of the Wilderness" and "El
ish people as a whole throughout Ha-Tzipor" (To the Bird) are in the

xt •

collection,

in addition to "Night,"
"Through Clouds of Fire" and
"From 'Songs of the People."
The attractive illustrations by
Maids Silverman add to the im-
portance of this volume.
Appearance of this volume at this
time is especially appropriate be-
cause of the approaching observ-
ance of the 100th anniversary of
Bialik's birth.

tir

•

Color him Young:

Richard Egosi is not sure of what he wants to be when he grows up. "I
mean . . I'm only 10 years old," he explains. For the moment, Richard is probably the nation's
youngest Jewish artist whose works—most of them on Jewish themes—are professionally exhibited.
He is shown with several of the 53 paintings—pastels, acrylics, inks and watercolors—featured in a
one-man showing in the Klut.znick Exhibit Hall of the Mai Brith Building in Washington, D.C. Richard
attends elementary school in Sag Harbor, N.Y. His mother, an artist, encouraged him.

