Mary and Death

Anna Margolin's Cycle, Complete

We’ve reached the last of Anna Margolin’s seven “Mary” poems. These past six weeks or so have been a lovely journey, translating the Mary sequence and sharing it with you. If you’d like to read my translations of the previous poems, I’ve put them together in one link here. You can find the original Yiddish in Margolin’s Lider.

I’m going to jump into the poem, but I did want to reiterate the brief requests I shared last week, which are again at the bottom of the newsletter. Thanks very much to those of you who replied to me with your thoughts, or shared this with your networks!

First, however, I encourage you to check out Toward Hopeful Skies, a beautiful new trilingual (Ukrainian-Yiddish-English) edition of two 1920’s Eastern European children’s books. It’s a neat project, featuring original illustrations; even neater is the fact that all proceeds go to support Ukrainian refugee relief.

Thanks to the Hebrew Union College library for sharing the following image of one of the original sources:

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Mary and Death

Mary bid the bright, illuminated house goodbye.
She bowed to the walls, and was gone.

And left in the night, as one walks into a forest
where God's breath is close and every figure frightening.

The night lay softly on her pain,
it lay like black, fondling snow.

And walking after her, joyous and colorful,
were beggar, drunkard, vagabond.

Like sad birds, lovesick,
cripples stumbled after her.

Lepers drew near, ashamed,
shielding their wounds with their hands.

And in the front there walked, longingly,
the boy death, with a dark flute. 

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This sequence began with the question of Mary’s desire—“what do you want, Mary?”—and concludes now with her journey towards death, which is perhaps, unless you’re a Buddhist, the only way for desire to end. Taken as a whole these poems express what I’ve come to think of as a radiant loneliness. Her solitary grief is rendered with such clarity and beauty that it becomes not just illuminated but luminous.

We end with an image of death as a Pied Piper, leading Mary and, behind her, a community of outcasts—the leprous, the addicted, the handicapped—to wherever he will go. Why are these figures following Mary? Perhaps this is another way for Margolin to insert a feminist subversion of Christianity into her poetry, as we might have expected them to be joyously following Jesus instead of her.

I’m so struck by the personification of death walking “longingly” (פֿאַרבענקטערהייט). I’m accustomed to thinking of death as a state without longing, so what does this death-boy yearn for as he walks through, or beyond, the world?

Fittingly, a reading of these poems conclues with questions, with doubts, with perplexment. Anything less would have been the easy way out. That last couplet gives me chills, and I can’t stop thinking about it; the image of “the boy death” haunts and lingers.

It puts me in mind of Kenneth Burke, who writes that poetry offers “a ritualistic way of arming us to confront perplexities and risks.” Death is, of course, the ultimate perplexity, and living is the ultimate risk; Margolin makes no attempt to soften this fact. Her refusal to take the easy way out as a writer also denies that easy way to her readers.

What a fine line she walks in providing us with an image of death at the close of these poems. A more neatly resolvable image would serve to flatten the mystery of death, would cheapen our grief, would be disrespectful to the perplexity and complexity of our experiences with living and dying.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the strangeness of so many moments in the Mary sequence, including this conclusion, and I’m left with the idea that the poems must be strange, because their concerns—God, death, desire, solitude, memory—are strange. Life is strange! Thank God we have strange poems to help us “countenance, stareddown, transfigure, treat” what would otherwise so often be unspeakable.

I took those quoted verbs from a passage by David Foster Wallace, whose yahrtzeit was a few days ago as I write this. Literature, he said, “is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

That’s my experience of these poems. Maybe this is too obvious to be worth stating, but who hasn’t been lonely, sometimes profoundly so? In Margolin’s Mary poems I find a way of reckoning with loneliness, of facing it and, without denying or suppressing it, transforming it into an experience of beauty.

On a different note, I’ve also been considering these poems in conversation with Leila Chatti’s writing about Mary, as in her beautiful poems Confession or Questions Directed Toward the Idea of Mary. Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet, and like Margolin brings a perspective to Mary that is not bound to or solely influenced by Christian orthodoxy. There seem to be interesting resonances between Chatti’s and Margolin’s Mary poems, and I hope to think and write more about that in the future.

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Thanks, again, to those of you who have already responded to this!

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