Today concludes this little run of Jacob Glatstein’s poems, though surely we’ll return to him at some point down the line.
But here’s a quick housekeeping note: I’ll be traveling to Europe for the next few weeks, first to officiate a friend’s wedding and then for some long-distance hiking, so this newsletter will take a brief summer vacation until the mid-July, or thereabouts. Thanks, as always, for reading, and I’ll see you then!
I gave the broad outlines of Glatstein’s biography a few weeks ago, and though there’s always more to discuss (like his strange 1943 poem, for children, about a fantastical Hitler-goblin’s downfall) let’s just dive into this week’s poems. I’ve only shared some of his shorter works here, but he has many wonderful long poems as well, including some on Hasidic themes which are among my favorites, and which I hope to translate at some point in the future.
So, two more of my favorite of his short poems: the first was published in the 1953 collection Dem Tatns Shotn (Father’s Shadow), and the second comes from Glatstein’s 1971 book Gezangen Fun Rekhts Tzu Links (Songs from Right to Left.)
A Letter
You meant nothing, you only burned.
You were a flaming letter.
You were so frightened when I almost comprehended you.
I wanted to interpret you
as a human word.
I almost clarified you.
All night I heard your voice,
heard that you wanted to remain a symbol,
a meaningless and terrifying letter.
I erased you.
Let It Be Blessed Honest and careful words have long since gone extinct. Before our eyes languages grow corrupt and false. Spoiled and syphilitic speech winks shamelessly, the basest man lays down the law. Let our grandmother Yiddish be blessed. Unspoken and unread, kept safe in the genizah, uncontaminated. We, refugees from the children of our children, bear memory like our destined yoke. No lips will make impure our Yiddish speech, from Shabbos through the whole week long.
In “Let It Be Blessed,” the word genizah refers to a storeroom in a synagogue for books and papers on which sacred material have been written; these cannot be thrown away, but must be saved or buried in a cemetery. If Yiddish is kept in a genizah, then, it suggests that the Yiddish language is itself as sacred as religious Hebrew writing, or even as the Tetragrammaton. This is a daring inversion of the classical hierarchy of Jewish languages, which often sees Yiddish as a mundane and secular language compared to sacred Hebrew.
I’m fascinated by the idea in this poem that “we,” which I read as “we Yiddish speakers,” are refugees from “our” descendants. What a strange and evocative way of thinking about assimilation’s power: someone who carries a dying tradition into America will be culturally dispossessed or even expelled by their own grandchildren. This makes me wonder: what are the ways I turn my ancestors into refugees, and destroy the world they call(ed) home?
Glatstein’s description of a pure, unsullied Yiddish is necessarily a description of a dead language: it is uncontaminated precisely because it is unspoken. What should we do with this poem’s opposition between corrupt language, which is alive and spoken, and undefiled, pure language, which is extinct? Can we access the kind of pure language this poem describes, or is it inaccessible to us, because as soon as we access it we have corrupted it? On the surface this poem seems like a sweet ode to Yiddish, but there is a very pessimistic undercurrent to it. Perhaps reading a dead language is the closest we can come to the pure language of the genizah.
“A Letter” is addressed to a letter of the alphabet. Central to Christian theology, of course, is the idea of the word made flesh; here, however, we have not even the word but only the letter, which is terrified of being reduced to a human form. I will be honest that I don’t really “understand” this poem, at least not in ways I can express with as much brevity as I need here. I think it has its roots in certain Kabbalistic ideas of the Hebrew letters themselves as numinous, transcendent beings.
But I also see this poem as a haunting meditation on the ways that language resists meaning, especially when language is reduced to its most basic components. (When you were a kid, did you ever say a word over and over again until it became almost unbearably strange and meaningless to you? What if that’s not just a gimmick, but actually something essential about what language really is?)
And with that, I’ll sign off for a few weeks. I fly to Europe later today, and I look forward to reconvening here when I return!
Interesting...
Have a wonderful trip.