Mary Wants To Be A Beggar
Plus: A Request From Readers
Today I’m happy to share the sixth, and penultimate, poem in Anna Margolin’s Mary series. For those just tuning in, you can read my translation of the first two here, numbers three and four at this link, and number five, “Mary and the Guests,” in last week’s installment.
I had intended only to share the first two Mary poems, but received such an encouraging and enthusiastic response to those that I decided to tackle all seven. Next week will be the last of Margolin’s “Mary” cycle, and I’m looking forward to considering the sequence as a whole.
But I’m also thinking, after spending a sustained chunk of time with Margolin, about next directions for this newsletter, and enjoying brainstorming some of the other poems and poets I plan to translate and discuss. I started this project as a way to share some of what I’d been reading and thinking about with family and friends, and I’m so gratified that it’s now sent out to hundreds of people in (at least) six countries. Thank you for being a part of this! With that in mind, I have some brief requests for those of you reading, which you can find at the end of today’s newsletter.
But in the meantime, since we’re still on the topic of Margolin, I stumbled recently upon this neat, short essay, by historian Shachar Pinsker, about “the Jewish women writers who made their mark on café culture.” Margolin gets a shout-out:
Another extraordinary woman in New York’s cafe scene was the poet Rosa Lebensboym, best known by the pen name Anna Margolin. In 1913, she settled in the city and joined the staff of the Yiddish newspaper Der tog, for which she wrote a weekly women’s column. When she began publishing modernist Yiddish poetry under her pen name in the 1920s, it aroused much attention — many believed that the mysterious poet was really a man. Ironically, success as an author meant some degree of anonymity. One of Margolin’s works is an exquisite cycle of poems entitled In kafe (“In the Café”), which starts with the line, “Now alone in the café.”
Pinsker’s book, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture, contains a wealth of information and anecdotes, including the names and locations of the various, now long-gone coffee houses Margolin and other great Yiddish poets once frequented.
Here’s Cafe Royal, which according to a 1937 write-up in the New Yorker was “the forum of Jewish intelligentsia.”
I love these little glimpses into the largely-forgotten social and cultural world out of which these poems emerged. And I think there’s some resonance between Pinsker’s statement that, for Margolin, “success as an author meant some degree of anonymity,” and Margolin’s Mary, who wants to leave her identity behind in order to find a truer self-knowledge. With that in mind, today’s poem:
Mary Wants To Be A Beggar
To be a beggar.
As if from a sinking ship
to throw all treasure to the wind:
the weight of your love and the weight of your joy,
so that I might no more be recognized,
my good or my bad name.
To be a beggar.
Silently to drag myself across the gray sidewalks
like the black shadow of every clear bright life,
and with the spare change I receive
to buy myself a quiet and insane dream
to play with,
a dream which coils silvery in opium smoke.
To fall asleep on the street beneath the sun
like an exhausted stalk in a field,
like a torn-up flower,
faded and impure
and still divine,
with a few smooth petals left.
And to shine with a lantern's frail light,
to unwrap myself from gray and quiet night
as fog unwraps from fog, as night from night.
To become supplication, to become a flame.
To give myself away tenderly, burning, without pity.
And to be lonely,
as nobody but kings and beggars are lonely.
And unhappy.
And to walk just so, with astonished eyes,
through vast, secret days and nights
to the high court,
to the racking light,
to myself.
I’m fascinated by this poem’s elliptical syntax. We’ve seen so many questions and discussions of desire in this series, as in “Mary and the Priest” and in the first poem’s repetitions: “What do you want, Mary?” Here we receive another answer: “Mary wants to be a beggar.”
And yet that verb, “wants,” disappears after the title. Instead of “want” again we find a list of infinitives: to be, to throw, to drag, to fall asleep, to become, to walk, that presumably elaborate on Mary’s desire. In a poem and a series of poems that are so explicitly concerned with want, how should we understand the sudden absence of that word, especially after it’s featured in the title?
One possible answer: it has the effect of forcing me to connect each new statement in the poem back to the word “want” which was only revealed in the title, so that while I read “Mary Wants To Be a Beggar” I am constantly referring in my mind to what is missing from the poem, what is unnamed, what was once gestured towards and is now gone.
This seems to me a powerful way of enacting the experience of desire through poetics. We only desire what we don’t have, what is missing; I remember that from my freshman Plato seminars, years ago. By forcing us to refract her poem through what is absent from it in order to make meaning, Margolin enters us into the experience of wanting.
While we move through “Mary Wants To Be a Beggar,” we return and return to a verb that is missing, just as Mary in these poems returns and returns to what is missing from her life.
But as is almost always the case with Margolin, no discussion would be complete without considering the poem’s ending. She walks “to the racking light,” which could also have been the painful light, the agonizing. And at the same time she is walking to herself. Self-knowledge, in this poem (and in general, I think), isn’t easy or comfortable.
At first it seems like a cathartic moment, especially after all the loneliness and desire that come before it. Maybe it is. But here the poem’s elliptical syntax complicates my reading. Does Mary actually walk toward herself, or does she only want to? A progression, and even an arrival, seems to have taken place through the course of this poem, but does that arrival take place, or does it exist only as something else to be desired?
The sense I have is that something real has occurred here for the speaker of this poem. But I’m not quite sure what, or how. Can wanting freedom be a kind of freedom? Can wanting to let go be a letting go? I’m inclined to say yes. Perhaps for Margolin’s Mary, desire is not just fixation on a lack but is itself a unique kind of self-knowledge.
I mentioned this above, so here are my requests as I think about the next direction of this newsletter:
If you have thoughts, suggestions, or feedback about this newsletter, I’d love to hear it. What would you like to see more of here? Less of? Please feel free to share your ideas by replying to this email.
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