More of Mary

Continuing Anna Margolin's Series

Below you’ll find the fifth of Anna Margolin’s seven Mary poems. You can read my translation of the first two poems here, and numbers three and four at this link.

I’ve already sketched out Margolin’s biography, but I do want to add a brief word about her position as a woman writer in Yiddish. In 1927, two years before Margolin’s only collection was published, the influential critic and poet Melech Ravitch wrote for a Warsaw newspaper: “I sifted through the gallery of all women poets that are in our possession…. Who can show me one work which excels the others? Everyone is equal. There are better and worse among them. But none is a work, only poems and little poems and littler poems.” (I’m quoting, here and in the next paragraph, from a translation by Norma Fain Pratt.)

Reviewing Margolin’s poetry for another Warsaw newspaper, however, Ravitch described Margolin as “a poet and person” with a “profound intellect” who surpassed “sentimental female emotion.” She was, Ravitch wrote, “a woman who contains tragedy and anger, sadness, nostalgia even, but no tears. And when there are tears, they are human tears.” Ravitch was generally an incisive critic, but this is pretty stupid.

Of course the topic of women’s writing in Yiddish deserves many books in itself—and if you’re interested in some of the dynamics of women’s lineages in Jewish poetry, you might check out Kathryn Hellerstein’s or Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s scholarship, among others—but I bring it up as a specific example of what a difficult position Margolin was in as a woman in a patriarchal literary culture.

I also wanted to share a Yiddish folk song, in a gorgeous version sung by Adah Hetko and Allison Posner. I love this song, and have listened to it many times; I include it today because the beauty of its loneliness, and the loneliness of its beauty, seem to me an apt soundtrack for Margolin’s Mary poems.

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Mary and The Guests

Mary walks in and out of rooms
arranging fruit, wine, thin flowers.
Bows, smiles in anxious joy,
and the house is empty,
though everyone's arrived.

Should it concern her that when young, so long ago, 
she glimmered in this old man’s dusk?
Should it concern her, she whose breath was caught once 
by the sad game of a life that fades away,
accompanied by blinding thoughts and by despair?
A long time did he linger as the great shadow
over all those, the dreamers, lords, and slaves,
she knew by night. 
You, silent, brown boy,
foreign, as if you wandered from a star,
you were my night within a white room, in a spring,
and you were mystical dark wine in tall glasses.
And you, half-holy and half-criminal,
or entirely a poet. Do you remember the sharp delight,
the outbreaks of affection and rage,
and at last the destined journey
through summer, through the drowsing cities?
And you, and you, and you. A long chain.
And the child is here.
It’s come through its great distances to mother’s door.
It crawled into the corner, tiny, full of grief.
It’s sunk into itself, the child, pale and quiet.
Eyes, do not rebuke me, eyes, do not turn away.

Beggar, welcome! You are dark and ugly as a raven,
but I once saw you laughing, 
as illuminated as a God, in a snowstorm.
This is a green star, two jasmine bushes,
a well in a courtyard--the guests from Lithuania.
And a wedding, blooming with joy, crammed with people,
and streets in chaos, and a long-extinguished flame.
And a huge crowd trapped between walls.
And chiseled from the wildest dream:
a dizzying spiral staircase.
In the sorrow of night, in a faraway city,
they used to rise with craving blood
and lead her up, up--
where?
Maybe into that low house
where vaguely, nearby,
mother's gray head,
mother's quiet hands,
grow pale beside the lamp.
Eyes, do not rebuke me, eyes, do not turn away.

A murmur, a swish, quiet derision.

Mary walks in and out of rooms.
A cold tranquility descends on her.
Her guests grow farther, and more unknown.
Who are you? And you, who are you? And you?
She is alone. At a strange celebration.
She was never woven into it.
She never lived her life.

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This is the longest of the Mary poems, and has been the hardest for me to translate, which is why I didn’t send it out last week as I had planned to do.

But Margolin sticks her landing once more with that devastating ending. After the long sequence of dreamlike images, we return to Mary’s human situation. The movements within “Mary and the Guests” are extraordinarily complex, as are the movements from poem to poem within this sequence. In “Lonely Mary” we were told that “among people she is / as if within a wilderness,” and here we see that statement concretized further, with Mary both alone in an empty house and surrounded by others, both in the present and tunneling through a surreal sequence of memories.

The repetitive questions here, which I read as Mary’s silent, imploring address to the guests from whom she feels so distant, recall the repeated questions of “What Do You Want, Mary?” And then those last three, devastating lines, the ending like a punch in the gut: “she never lived her life.”

I see those last lines in part as a feminist critique of Christian theologies and narratives around Mary. “Mariology,” the theology of Mary in Christian tradition, and her many narratives and icons, claim to center and to celebrate Mary, as in this poem’s “strange celebration.” But is a real human life present in those narratives and theologies? Or is whatever person Mary might have been necessarily overwhelmed by an accumulation of ideas and liturgies and gospels and shrines? So that Mary as a human being ceases to exist, is denied the opportunity to ever have lived her life. (My reading here is also influenced by Colm Toibin’s beautiful novella, The Testament of Mary.)

Kathryn Hellerstein, in the book I linked to above, provides a helpful reading of these poems, which tracks as well with the gendered dynamics of the Yiddish literary scene: “if a woman, like the New Testament’s Mary, encounters God and is impregnated by Him with divinity, she will be sacrificed to men’s ideals. She will bear a child whom she cannot mother, and she will be isolated among people….”

Melissa Weininger’s astute comment on Hellerstein’s claim here is very helpful as well:

This encounter with divinity works on two levels: first, as a metaphor for the condition of women under patriarchy, in which they are subject to the whims, desires, and laws of the father; and second, as a metaphor for the woman poet, whose experience of the world Margolin compared to a persistent and painful, and perhaps unwanted, encounter with divinity that simultaneously offered fulfillment and rewards. Margolin wrote to her lover Reuben Iceland, “The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes.” This semi-divine experience of the poet-as-seer sets her apart from others, in a way analogous to Mary’s encounter with God in the poems.

But what should we do with the details of the strange and eerie progression of images and questions and second-person addresses which come between them? Well, I don’t really know. And I would take a much longer essay to track and analyze that progression with any justice.

I love this poem, though, including those parts of it which I can’t understand. I have the sense when I’m reading them that Margolin has found a way to make dreaming a public experience. She’s not unique in that, and I’m not the first one to describe art as a kind of collective or public dreaming. I think she’s inviting us into her subconscious dreamworld, and I think she’s aware that this is what she’s doing, and wants us to be aware as well.

Consider the spiral staircase, “chiseled from the wildest dream,” or the fated journey through “drowsing cities.” The language of sleep and dreaming is a backdrop to this poem, and singals the type of terrain this it traverses.

Which doesn’t mean, even though the poem follows its own kind of dream-logic, that we can’t or shouldn’t think intellectually about it. And this poem does raise many questions for me which I'm not quite sure how to answer, but hope to put more thought into. Who, for example, are the many figures this poem addresses through the second person, and why does it give us such a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of these addresses? Are they Mary’s guests, and/or are they fractured parts of her self? Who is the “old man” in whose dusk Mary glimmered so long ago, and why would or wouldn’t it concern her?

I’m inclined to read this “old man” as an irreverent and intimate description of the God with whom, in the world of Christian myth, she conceived a son, but that just raises more questions for me. Who, and whose, is the “silent, brown boy?” A hazy version, perhaps, of Jesus—or am I trying too willfully to pin down this poem’s strangeness, to force it into narratives and structures I can account for?

Overall, reading and translating this poem, I’m left less with ideas and more with a felt experience. Of Mary’s sadness, and psychic fragmentation, and alienation from the world and from herself at once. That deep, deep loneliness which Margolin has found a way not just to describe, but to enact through language.

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As always, thanks for tuning in. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.