{"id":12179,"date":"2014-08-02T06:27:53","date_gmt":"2014-08-02T10:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12179"},"modified":"2014-08-02T06:27:53","modified_gmt":"2014-08-02T10:27:53","slug":"the-many-lives-of-a-political-poem-from-hebrew-to-arabic-to-another-life-in-hebrew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/the-many-lives-of-a-political-poem-from-hebrew-to-arabic-to-another-life-in-hebrew\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Lives of a Political Poem: From Hebrew, to Arabic, to Another Life in\u00a0Hebrew"},"content":{"rendered":"

via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English)<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

BY\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY<\/a><\/span><\/span>\u00a0on<\/em>\u00a00<\/a>\u00a0)<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Over at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review, poet and translator Peter Cole writes about the ironic new life that Benjamin Netanyahu has given\u00a0to Hayim Nahman Bialik\u2019s poem \u201cOn the Slaughter\u201d:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

In the days after the three Israeli teens were murdered, most likely hours after their kidnapping, Netanyahu publicly expressed condolences to the families while quoting from Bialik: \u201cVengeance \u2026 for the blood of a small child, \/ Satan has not yet created.\u201d<\/p>\n

Netanyahu\u00a0continued by adding: \u201cHamas is responsible \u2014 and Hamas will pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Cole writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Never mind that the poem intoned by Mr. Netanyahu wasn\u2019t Israeli: it was written long before the state was founded and very far from it. \u201cOn the Slaughter\u201d was the thirty-year-old Odessan Hayim Nahman Bialik\u2019s immediate response to the April 1903 pogroms in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev, where some forty-nine Jews were slashed, hacked, and cudgeled to death, or drowned in outhouse feces, and hundreds were wounded over the course of several days. Women and girls were raped repeatedly. The Jewish part of town was decimated. Netanyahu quoted just two lines, carefully avoiding the one preceding them: \u201cCursed be he who cries out: Revenge!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cole also adds, interestingly, that the poem received a \u201cpotent 1966 translation by the first star of Palestinian resistance poetry, Rashid Hussein.\u201d He further imagines that the poem could have had another life in Arabic, as\u00a0one might well imagine \u201ca YouTube reading of Hussein\u2019s translation by a thirty-year-old poet in what\u2019s left of the Gazan neighborhood of Sheja\u2019iyeh[.]\u201c<\/p>\n

Cole noted, over email, that his wife, Adina Hoffman, wrote more in-depth about Rashid Hussein and his Bialik translation in her\u00a0My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness:\u00a0A Poet\u2019s Life in the Palestinian Century.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Rashid<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, there is a beautiful brief\u00a0sketch\u00a0of Rashid Hussein in the book, a poet Mahmoud Darwish would call \u201cthe star.\u201d Hoffman writes that Hussein was the first Palestinian poet \u201cto have graduated from an Israeli high school, and this gave him a window onto both Hebrew literature and world literature in Hebrew translation. The window worked in complex ways, making him more sympathetic to the feelings of his Jewish countrymen \u2014 while it also granted him the insight to write, as he would that same year, that \u2018whoever denies us [Arabs] the right to express our suffering and our hopes must also deny Bialik and [Hebrew-language Russian-Jewish poet Shaul] Tchernikovsky most of their nationalist poems.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Also: \u201cRashid would go on to translate a book of Bialik\u2019s poems into Arabic; he was hired to do so by the editors of a series sponsored by the Hebrew University, but it was an assignment of of which he was proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Cole further noted in email, very little has been written aout the translations, but, \u201cSo far as we know\u2014they didn\u2019t circulate beyond Israel\u2019s Arabic readership. \u2026 Whether or not they were ever reprinted, in Beirut, say, or anywhere else \u2014 we just don\u2019t know. But it seems unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cole adds that Hussein\u2019s \u201caim in doing the Bialik was, in part, to make a statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is impossible to know what Bialik would think of Netanyahu\u2019s use of his poem, but the poem, like\u00a0other political poetry, seems to have its own declared allegiance.<\/p>\n

More:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the poem in English translation<\/a><\/p>\n

Read the poem in Arabic translation<\/a><\/p>\n

Two poems by Hussein, trans. Sinan Antoon<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via the always excellent Arab Literature (in English): BY\u00a0MLYNXQUALEY\u00a0on\u00a0AUGUST 2, 2014 \u2022\u00a0(\u00a00\u00a0) Over at\u00a0The Paris Review, poet and translator Peter Cole writes about the ironic new life that Benjamin Netanyahu has given\u00a0to Hayim Nahman...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,52,59,67,79,91,103,1],"tags":[1564,1563,1565],"class_list":["post-12179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaza-strip","category-human-rights","category-israel","category-man-made-disaster","category-palestine","category-poetry","category-translation","category-uncategorized","tag-hayim-nahman-bialik","tag-peter-cole","tag-rashid-hussein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12179"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12181,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12179\/revisions\/12181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}