Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) [Paperback]

Hayyim Nahman Bialik (Author), Atar Hadari (Author, Editor), Dan Miron (Introduction)

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After My Death
Alone
And It Came To Pass (from The Visions Of The Latter-day Prophets)
And Whoever He Be Who Comes After
At Close Of Day
Be To Me Once More A Shelter
Before The Book Closet
Between The River Prat And Stream Hidkel
Butterfly
Call For The Snakes
City Of The Killings
The Conductor Of The Dance
Dusk
Even In His Revelation To Your Eyes
A Faithful Tear
God Did Not Show
A Golden Carriage
Graveyard
Her Eyes
The Hungry Eyes
I Knew In A Night Of Fog
I Sowed To The Wind My Sigh
I Was Not Given Light
I've A Garden
If Satan...
If The Angel Asks
If There Comes A Day When You Shall Find
In False Promises Don't Trust
In Me There Nest Snakes And Adders
Indeed This People Is Grass
It Was A Summer Night
King David's Tomb
A Little Note
Midnight Prayer
My Father
My Mother, Her Memory Be Blessed
My Peacock Of Gold
My Soul Blows
A New Way
Night Thoughts
Nobody Knew Who She Was
Not In The Day Nor In The Night
On A Day Of Summer, Hot Day
On The Morning Star
On The Slaughter
On Your Heart That's Barren
One By One And With No One Seeing
One Distant Star
One Finds Dinars
One Has A Precious Stone
One, Two
Only One Ray
Outside The Countenance Of God
A Penny, A Penny
The Pool
Prophet, Go Flee!
Ring Ring
The Scroll Of Fire 1
The Scroll Of Fire 2
The Scroll Of Fire 3
The Scroll Of Fire 4
The Scroll Of Fire 5
The Scroll Of Fire 6
The Scroll Of Fire 7
The Scroll Of Fire 8
The Scroll Of Fire 9
The Sea Of Silence
Secrets Of Night
Sometimes The Heart
Songs Of Winter 1
Songs Of Winter 2
Songs Of Winter 3
Songs Of Winter 4
Songs Of Winter 5
Speech
Stand Strong, Wall Of Sorrow
Stars Wink And Go Out
Summer Is Waning
Take Me In Under Your Wing
The Tear Drop Dropped
That I Could Be One Of You
They Are Shaking Themselves Off From Dust
They Are Shaking Themselves Off From Dust 2
To The Legend
To Your Hidden Way
Tonight I Lurked
A Twig Fell
When I Return
Where Are You
Who Am I And What Am I
With The Last Red Dregs Of Sunset
Yesterday's Stems
You Are Going From Me
Your Breath Passed Upon My Face
Your Two Eyes
[untitled]
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd) (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815606052
• ISBN-13: 978-0815606055
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars spirited, September 7, 2002

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) (Paperback)

Loathe as I am to admit it now that I do know, I have to say that I'd never heard of Hayim Nahman Bialik until Mr. Hadari contacted us. Nor, I suspect, have many of you. This is an injustice, one that Mr. Hadari's translations can hopefully help to right.

Hayim (or Chaim) Nahman Bialik is considered the national poet of Israel, even though he died before the state was founded. He is also considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets ever. In fact, one of his achievements was to restore Hebrew as the language of Jewish poetry, rather than the Yiddish that had become more common. Bialik was born in Radi, Russia, and was raised there and in Zhitomir, by a scholarly father and, upon his father's death, by a stern and scholarly grandfather. Upon reaching adulthood he lived off and on in Odessa which, unlike other Russian cities which forbade them, had a sizable population of Jews (including fellow writers like Isaac Babel, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Ahad Ha'am, a Zionist who was one of Bialik's mentors). Bialik worked in business, as a teacher, as an editor, and finally as a publisher. He traveled in Europe and to what was then Palestine. After the Communist Revolution in Russia, when he came under suspicion for his writings, Bialik moved first to Germany and then to Tel Aviv where he was buried after dying in Vienna following an operation in 1934. Over the course of his career he translated Jewish folk tales, wrote Zionist essays and wrote his own poems (though not many after 1916). It was these last that made his name. And it was one specific poem that made him a central figure in the history of Zionism.

Living in Czarist Russia, he witnessed at first hand the brutal treatment of the Jewish people. In particular, he visited the city of Kishinev (modern day Chisinau, Moldova) after the 1903 pogrom in which 50 Jews were murdered.Ê Fueled by anger both at what had been done and at the inadequacy of Jewish response, he wrote his greatest poem, the one with which Mr. Hadari begins the collection : City of the Killings (1903). I wish I could find the whole thing on-line because it's unbelievably powerful...

From his own comments in the Translator's Note and from Dan Miron's Introduction, it sounds like Mr. Hadari has focussed more on capturing the spirit and the rhythms of the poems, than trying to artificially preserve exact rhymes and wordings :

"If a poem is mostly words--and fancy words at that--there's precious little there. What I look for is attack, as Derek Walcott would put it-- it's not enough to know what the word means, though that helps; one needs to also get a sense of the spin on the word--so that if I take liberties with the translation, to take the necessary liberty of translation that results in the flight of the new poem, I must have a sense of the bias of the material; as may be the case in the treatment by the novelist of historical material, or indeed the treatment by a historian of that same material--he uses historical material but it's the bias of his treatment that's interesting, just like the historian's choice of facts determining the portrait; so with the poem, if the feeling charging the words is absent, if the feeling in fact doesn't overwhelm the language, like a current making the touch of the actual line dangerous, there's no poem to prepare--no song that can be rephrased in English; the translator is, finally a harmonizer with the lead vocal; in the prime moments he is reproducing the singer, in the same key, with variations, in another language. That is the problem, to find the same rhythms, near the same sense, and with the right emotional current. If there's no current, how can you possibly begin to raise your voice? Let alone if the words resist comprehension, and the rhythm stutters. "

Not knowing the originals, nor any Hebrew, I've no idea how successful he's been in this task, but I do know that Mr. Hadari's translations tap into a rich emotional current and get you to raise your voice. Whether or not it's precisely Bialik's spirit, they're certainly spirited. Mr. Hadari's done a great service by making the poetry of Bialik accessible to the wider audience the great poet deserves.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An old master for modern times, March 4, 2002

By 

"sportymich01" (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) (Paperback)

Don't let the obscure name and the academic packaging put you off, Bialik is a marvelous and accessible poet. Atar Hadari has rendered these poems in a terse, beautiful language that will appeal to the modern ear. Take a look at the excerpt offered on this web site to see just how powerful a poet Bialik was. His "City of the Killings" contains images that might have influenced our current poet of carnage, Cormac McCarthy. Elsewhere in the volume, you will find poems of beauty and longing that match anything being written today.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the Translator's Forward, September 2, 2001

By 

Atar Hadari (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art) (Paperback)

Bialik was a provincially raised and very matter of fact, earthy,
often vulgar, frequently humorous and scabrous tongued
individual whose poetry in all its great romanticism
is sustained, in the original Hebrew, by a vivid lust
and longing for life in all its full colour. In his translations Bialik was often made
rather more holy than anyone might healthily be in
life and more so than might be healthy for keeping
their verse alive after their death. As Robert Alter
observed: "Because the educators and textbook anthologizers see
Bialik and Tchernichovsky as "national poets", the
pieces they typically choose to present to students
are generally those with obviously national content -
Bialik's hymns of praise to traditional Jewish fortitude and his songs of hope for a rebuilt
homeland... complaints by students about the"official" appearance of the two poets are nearly
universal... particularly in the case of Bialik, personal and national experience are often so
completely fused that it is impossible to make a distinction between the two."
He goes on to describe the resistance he encounters
when trying to introduce Jewish college freshmen with
basic Hebrew to the work of Bialik:"... I collided
with a student at Brandeis who refused to accept one
of Bialik's most warmly sensual love poems for what it
seemed to be. Surely, he argued, a poet like Bialik
wouldn't write about romping with a young girl in a
sunlit field - rather, the girl was the Community of
Israel, her companion was the Divine Spouse, the dark
woods were the Exile, and so forth."
Reader, the present translator's effort was to
convince you that not only was the girl a girl in a
sunlit field, but also that she was pretty, that
Bialik was hot for her and that her hair smelt nice.