Klein's Translations of Moyshe Leib Halpern: a Problem of Jewish Modernismby Linda Rozmovits On September 9, 1932, one week after the death of the Yiddish poet Moyshe Leib Halpern, there appeared in the Montreal based Canadian Jewish Chronicle, a tribute in the form of seven of Halpern's poems in English translation by the Canadian Jewish poet A.M. Klein.1 Six of the poems: "Mayn portret" ("Portrait of the Artist"), "A modne makhshove" ("Conceit Curious"), "Hee-Hee" ("Ki-Ki"), "Dos letste lid" ("The Last Song"), "Di zun vet aruntergeyn" ("The Golden Parrot"), and a fragment from "A nakht" ("Last Will and Testament") are from Halpern's 1919 collection In New York; "Shir Hashirim" ("Canticum Canticorum") opens Halpern's second collection The Golden Peacock which appeared in 1924.2 In approaching this body of material one immediately recognizes that no great insight is apt to be gained into Halpern's work. Klein's translations of these poems are remarkable primarily for their utter lack of fidelity to the original texts. Conversely, however, the material does suggest a great deal about Klein himself precisely because of the total lack of sympathy he shows for the sentiment Halpern sought to express. Thus the issue at hand is to discover the impulse behind Klein's remarkable infidelity. I Part of the great wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe in the early part of the century, Moyshe Leib Halpern settled in New York and lived out a typically uneasy existence. As an emigré and a poet, Halpern's condition was perpetually that of not belonging, so that in many ways he epitomizes the figure of the alienated modern poet.3 His work in In New York is pervaded by this theme, drawing heavily on the experience of displacement and isolation of both the literal emigré and his literary counterparts in poetry and in love. Halpern's world is plagued by uncertainty, often to the point that one cannot decide which is worse — the place one has just come from or the place one finds oneself in. The only constant appears to be disappointment and the only unfailing impulse the paradoxical one that compels one both to "long for home and hate your homeland".4 As a modernist, Halpern's position was equally betwixt and between. Noted for both his association with the group of Yiddish aesthetes known as the "Yunge"5, and for his reputation as a proletarian poet, in reality, Halpern never made his peace with either. Sympathetic to that aspect of the tenet of art for art's sake which freed the Jewish writer of obligation to write in the service of his community or to treat Jewish material in an uncritical or sentimental way, Halpern could yet not abide the idealistic notion of a poetry of refinement which constituted the aim of several of his contemporaries. What truth could there be in a self-validating notion of poetic beauty that was so obviously divorced from the realities of everyday existence? Repelled though he may have been by the unabashed vulgarity of certain aspects of the immigrant experience, Halpern could not condemn a lack of refinement that was so evidently predicated by necessity. Similarly, while he was attracted by the challenge to tradition offered by the Russian Revolution, Halpern could no more bear the proletarian banner than he could aspire toward a rarefied aesthetic. Halpern's work was too bleak and difficult to inspire the common man, and while he did enjoy a period of fruitful association with the Communist newspaper the Freiheit, he eventually managed to alienate his publishers by his unorthodoxy, and his readers through the inaccessibility of his work. For Halpern it was not the details of either the aestheticist or Marxist position that presented the greatest problem, but rather the absolutism implied by any ideal. Halpern's only unequivocal commitment was to his unrelenting individualism so that the one thing he could with certainty call his own was isolation. Inverting the Romantic ideal of poetry, Halpern sets out to salvage poetic truth by rummaging through the most unadorned and unseemly elements of everyday existence. Thus, Halpern's aesthetic displays its characteristic self-deprecating modernism. His language is plainspoken, forceful, and strongly idiomatic, frequently tipping over into deliberate vulgarity. His imagery is smaller-than-life, displaying things that are broken, dirty, paltry, and inadequate. His characters, for the most part, are unappealing and anti-heroic. They behave badly, are petty and uncomprehending, they harbor false hopes and suffer from brokenheartedness. Moments of beauty (though never really of peace) do occur but they are rare and inevitably assailed by the uncertainty which dominates the world of the poems. Apparently unable to abide even the slightest hint of transcendence, Halpern's aesthetic recalls the familiar sense of squalor which, for artists of all nationalities and disciplines, came to characterize the modern condition. A full generation younger than Halpern, Klein, by the time he came to translate Halpern's work, had already begun to show a strong affinity for modernism. As a student at McGill University in the late 1920's and early 1930's, encountering such figures as A.J.M. Smith, Frank Scott, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel, he found himself at the vanguard of the modernist movement in Canada. Although his greatest achievements as a modernist were still some years away, Klein's poetry at this stage already shows signs of the modernist influence, most notably, the influence of T.S. Eliot. Like Halpern, who had presented a Jewish J. Alfred Prufrock in his Zarkhi poems, Klein experimented with Prufrock poems of his own in the form of "Diary of Abraham Segal, Poet", and "Soirée of Velvel Kleinberger". Moreover, Klein was also beginning to recognize the difficulties inherent in the role that both he and Halpern had to play. Pulled between his own desire for artistic independence and a sense of obligation to the community, Klein too suffered the familiar dilemmas of the Jewish modern artist. If it is true then that Halpern's work in many ways epitomizes modern poetry, and that Klein as an educated and sympathetic student of modernism was in as good a position as anyone to appreciate that work, it remains to be understood how and why Klein rendered Halpern's poems into the virtually unrecognizable, thoroughly demodernized form that he did. II The first problem which must be addressed in assessing Klein's translations of Halpern is that of context. In New York is so carefully structured a work that the relation of a particular poem to the collection as a whole, affects the reader's response to that poem. In order to appreciate the extent to which Klein misrepresents Halpern's work, one must have a sense of how utterly decontexualized, and as a result, how thoroughly demodernized, it is.6 In New York is meticulously structured along both temporal and thematic lines.7 On the temporal level, Halpern chose a complex three part structure for In New York. On the first level, the collection moves through one day in the life of an immigrant in New York City from morning to night, on the second, through the life of the "poète maudit from childhood to death", and on the third, through the "epic repetition of the ejection from the Garden of Eden into the exile of Israel"8. The collection is also divided thematically into five sections: "Undzer gortn" ("Our Garden"), which propels the reader into the deflated new promised land of America, "In der fremd" ("In a Foreign World"), which explores the dilemmas and disappointments of the immigrant experience, "Blond un bloy" ("Blond and Blue"), which moves inward to focus on the unhappy experiences of the poet in love, "Ovnt" ("Evening"), which moves even more deeply inward into a world of existential speculation, and "A nakht" ("A Night"), which moves finally outward into an engulfing apocalyptic nightmare. Klein's selection of material ignores the conceptual framework of In New York as a whole and thus distorts the character of the poems he chooses to present. His selection avoids many of the obviously representative choices and sidesteps all the most forceful and cynical material. The character of three of the poems, "Ki-Ki", "The Golden Parrot", and "Last Will and Testament", removed from their places within the collection, is seriously altered, a problem which is exacerbated by Klein's extremely free translation of the titles in the latter two cases.9 In context, these poems stand out as part of an ironic contrasting thread in the overall fabric. Ostensibly they offer relief from the bleakness which comprises the dominant pattern, but, in fact, as they appear in In New York, these poems undercut their own idealism exposing it as escapist fantasy. Taken out of context, this irony, which depends almost entirely on the poems' relation to their surroundings, is simply not evident, and they suffer a virtual reversal of meaning. Thus, "Ki-Ki", which presents just such a pathetic and ultimately unfulfilled dream, becomes a kind of fantastic tale assuring the happiness of the poet, and "The Golden Parrot", a folk ballad which lulls the reader beautifully and insidiously into death, becomes a blandly innocent song of comfort. "Last Will and Testament" fares perhaps the worst of the three. The poem is in fact doubly fragmented, removed not only from "A nakht", but even further from its place as the final stanza of the last section of the poem. Thus it loses both its relation to the epic nightmare setting of the whole, and to the two preceding stanzas of the final section which are wholly different in character and thus temper the reader's response to the final lines. The two preceding stanzas are much more syntactically obscure and imagistically forceful than the final, translated one. And in describing the futile journey of a ship "burning on a sea of blood", these lines clearly indicate that the poet's lack of resistance to death at the end of the poem is due not to mystical transcendence as Klein would have it, but rather to total nihilism. A second striking problem with Klein's translations of Halpern is his consistent choice of an elevated poetic diction which is antithetical to Halpern's aesthetic of the unadorned. Klein's diction, perhaps more than any other element, betrays an impulse to "elevate" Halpern's work. His treatment of a poem like "Mayn portret" presents a particularly extreme example of this type of misrepresentation. In "Mayn portret", Halpern presents a compelling self-portrait which derives much of its power from the dynamic between the apparent unattractiveness of the poet's surface and the real qualities which lie hidden beneath. In a deliberate and unaffected manner, the poet draws attention to his own defects: his greying hair, unattractive physical features, and lack of cultural accomplishment are all listed for the lady to whom the poem is addressed. The success of the poem, and presumably of the poet as suitor, depends on the contrast between these prominent defects and the poet's hidden, more intangible assets: the unexpected mildness of his eyes, the strength of his hands, the hammering of his heart, and his considerable, though invisible, passions. Here, as in many of Halpern's poems, the simplicity of the language is pivotal; it determines both the character of the speaker and the logical unfolding of the poem. This is not the calculated understatement of a dissembling sophisticate; this is the language of a man who, knowing that there is no point in trying to hide his shortcomings, ironically makes a bid for happiness by putting them on the line. When the poem shifts to reveal the poet's hidden strengths, we realize that the more unrefined the opening lines, the more striking the contrast will be, and hence the greater the attractions will seem when they are finally revealed. Klein's choice of elevated diction in translating the poem renders it unrecognizable in many respects. The second stanza provides an excellent illustration of this. Halpern's text in literal prose translation reads as follows:
Klein translates the passage like this:
The character of the speaker and the play between surface and hidden elements are completely obscured by the choice of diction. The contrast between apparent weakness and real virtue depends so heavily on the unaffectedness of the language that, by elevating the diction, the spirit, indeed the whole point, of the poem is lost. Another problem with Klein's translations of Halpern, similar to the problem of elevated diction, is that of elevated detail. For just as the coarseness of language is central to the logic of Halpern's poems, so is the sense of threadbareness and disarray. Halpern's messiness is obviously a part of his carefully calculated poetic strategy, but, ignoring the obvious, Klein persists in cleaning up after him. In "Conceit Curious", for example, the detail, perhaps even more than the narrative itself, generates the sense of pathos in the poem. The poet imagines a scene in which he dies in mid-line while writing a poem, with no one at home to mark the event but his presumably uninterested landlady. The scrap of paper on which the poem is written flies out the window, lands on the front step, and ends up under the foot of the poet's lady who has come to call. Unaware of what is trapped under her shoe, she is angry at his failure to answer, and writes him a note which he too will never receive. Thus it is a combination of pettiness and fate which prevents the poet's tragedy from ever becoming known, and it is Halpern's deliberately diminished detail which most forcefully conveys this realization. Klein translates the "goyishe landlady" into a "heathen dame", the unfinished poem on a scrap of paper into a "song on a written sheet", the woman's foot into a "waiting shoe", and even the anger of the woman into "wrath". He also elevates phrases: "look at" into "gaze . . . and stare . . . and watch . . . ", and "blown by the wind" into "as the wind flies", and inserts the phrase "the ruin of my defeat" as an embellishment to the pen and paper which are all Halpern allows as monuments to the poet's existence. Consequently, what he ends up with is a poem in which the refinement of detail stands in opposition to the whole thrust of the poem, in effect, a poem neutralized into pointlessness. Finally, we reach the most blatantly anti-modern aspect of Klein's treatment of Halpern's poems, his reworking of narrative lines. It is here, in the issue of poetic narrative, that the strongest evidence of Klein's lack of sympathy for Halpern's work lies. Halpern's world view does not invite interpretive debate; it is overwhelmingly pessimistic, anti-Romantic, and frequently paralytic. Klein effectively reverses Halpern's perspective, turning it into something essentially tolerant, sentimental, and light hearted. While even marked shifts in tone may be attributed to the unavoidable infidelities of translation, pointed changes in narrative lines simply cannot. Three of the poems, "Ki-Ki", "The Golden Parrot", and "The Last Song", provide the best illustrations of this. In "Ki-Ki", Halpern employs a fairy tale setting as a variation on his usual nightmarish use of the dream motif.10 The poet, in tears as the poem opens, receives a letter of comfort from the queen of "Sun-land", delivered by the dwarf Ki-Ki who arrives on a magical bird. The poet writes a reply which he gives the pair to deliver back to the queen, but as the two disappear into the red sky of morning (another consistently ominous symbol in In New York), the moment is revealed to be one of perpetual anxiety and not of pleasant anticipation, with the poet awakening to find himself once again, both literally and metaphorically, alone. Halpern's choice of the non-realistic setting, far from suggesting something like the redemptive power of the imagination, appears to be largely sardonic in intent; the element of fantasy serves to aggravate rather than to relieve the dominant urban and realistic tensions of the collection as a whole. In Klein's version, the anxiety which pervades the original is entirely removed. The poet's relationship to the "empress", as Klein prefers to call her, is embroidered into one of great and mutual affection. Where Halpern tells us only that she sends the poet "seven greetings", Klein tells us that she sends "Love and regards, and love, and kisses seven". Klein also installs the empress in a "royal heaven" which does not appear at all in Halpern but is repeated three times by Klein, most problematically when he uses the phrase to close the poem so that instead of disappearing "hidden / In a cloud of the red morning", the pair fly off triumphantly "Into the red dawn, into the royal heaven". "The Golden Parrot" undergoes a similar transformation. Although essentially a folk ballad without a strong narrative thrust, the poem does present a basic motif in three variations which show a definite progression. In the first stanza, love comes to sorrow which is sitting, weeping alone; in the second, the golden peacock, symbol of Yiddish folk song, but here metaphorically representative of tradition, comes to take people to where longing is drawing them; and ultimately, in the third stanza, night comes, bringing not just sleep but eternal rest. Clearly, the progression is from the temporary comforts of love and tradition (or communal belonging) to the final comfort of death. Klein, in translating the poem simply excludes the final element. There is no mention of death in the poem, with Klein's version ending simply in sleep. Klein's handling of "The Last Song" is the most strikingly anti- modern of the three. In "The Last Song", Halpern presents a typically modern re-working of an ancient story, in this case the story of Creation. Not surprisingly, he inverts the traditional rendering so that instead of the gradual unfolding of Creation what we see is the progressively meaningless retreat of Creation back into primordial darkness — a kind of Anti-Genesis.11 Halpern's story is patently amoral; in language stripped down to the bare minimum he simply relates a final series of events:
Klein, on the other hand, situates Halpern's poem firmly in a moral universe. He translates nihilism into prophecy so that what we see is not a meaningless chain reaction but rather the catastrophic consequence of some immoral cause:
What then are we to make of Klein's radically unfaithful translations of Halpern's poems? III Klein's unsympathetic treatment of Halpern's poems can best be understood as a response to the problem which lay at the heart of his own, as well as of Halpern's, life and work: the problem of artistic modernism within a Jewish context. Both ideologically and practically, modernism and Jewishness stood in opposition.12 The former advocated artistic solitude and encouraged irreverence and anti-traditionalism, in effect, separation from one's community. The latter laid indisputable claim to the writer's identity and consciousness whether or not he chose to acknowledge the fact. Thus to function as a Jewish modernist was to face more than just the familiar unenviable choosing between artistic integrity and a loyalty to one's community. It was to perpetually struggle with the terrible paradox of trying to accommodate, within a single creative intelligence, two ideologies so opposed that one could only be advanced at the expense of the other. And it was to do so at a moment in history when the claims of both community and art were especially strong. Not surprisingly, Klein's strategy in coping with the Jewish modern paradox was itself paradoxical. On the one hand, when one considers Klein's career in terms of artistic influences and output, it is obviously substantially that of a modern poet; Pound, Eliot, Rilke, and of course Joyce, figure centrally in Klein's life and work. But on the other hand, we find that whenever Klein tackled the issues of modernism head on, he tended to do so as critic and not as advocate. Attracted by modernism's aesthetic and intellectual virtuosity, Klein was equally repelled by its innate élitism; his sense of modern artistic accomplishment was invariably countered by his sense of the social cost. Klein's writing about modern poetry, for example, most often takes the form of an argument against the élite and anti-democratic tendencies of figures like Eliot and Pound. Moreover, Klein was especially harsh in his judgment of modern artists when they happened to be Jews. Assimilated American writers like Karl Shapiro, became predictable targets. In Klein's view these writers, whom he considered to be "American by Jewish dissuasion"13 were asserting their modernism at the expense of their Jewish identity. Elitist behavior in others was unconscionable — in Jews it constituted the most pathetic and opportunistic form of personal and artistic self-betrayal. Conversely, when dealing with modern literature which he considered to be suitably positive with regard to its Jewishness, Klein often displayed a totally uncritical, and at times disturbingly sentimental attitude. Writing, for example, about the work of J.I. Segal, a poet whose vision lay rooted at the opposite pole from that of Halpern's, Klein could hardly find superlatives grand enough to express his appreciation of Segal's view. For Klein, Segal's poetry invoked a world where experience was suffused with the "familiar fragrance of worn and cherished things", piety and scholarship assumed their rightfully mythic dimensions, and unharassed, "God's worthy Jews [could] indulge in [their] nasal humming during the twilit moments of Sabbath afternoons"14. Clearly, Klein valued not only Yiddish poetry but Yiddishkeit — Yiddish culture in general, for the alternative it offered to the anti-social élitism of modern art, for the ways in which it supported Jewish values and society, and the ways in which it answered Jewish needs. The world of Yiddish culture was, for Klein, a territory of comfort and retreat in an increasingly uncomfortable world. In In New York, Halpern invaded that territory with poems that Klein was driven to claim were "essentially European and 20th century" but manifestly "not . . . Yiddish"15, despite the language they were written in. Klein's attempt to strip these poems of all vestiges of modernism is a striking example of his perpetually conflicted response to the terrible double pull of community and art. It was a dilemma that would develop as did his own writing, growing in tragic proportion to his increasing stature as a Jewish modern artist. Notes
Because Klein's treatment of "Shir Hashirim" neither presents any unique problems of translation nor contradicts the arguments made about the other works discussed, I have for the sake of focus, limited my discussion to the six poems from In New York.[back] See Ruth R. Wisse, "A Yiddish Poet in America", Commentary, 70 (July 1980), 35-41.[back] Moyshe Leib Halpern, "Benk aheim".[back] "Die Yunge" means "the young ones". For a discussion of this group see: Ruth R. Wisse, "Di Yunge and the Problem of Jewish Aestheticism", Jewish Social Studies, 38 (1976), 265-76, and "Di Yunge: Immigrants or Exiles?" Prooftexts, 1 (1981), 43-61.[back] Seth Wolitz, "Structuring the World View in Halpern's In New York", Yiddish, 3 (1977), 56-57, discusses Halpern's deliberate strategy in constructing In New York out of previously published and unpublished material.[back] Wolitz, and Kathryn Hellerstein in her Introduction to In New York, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), pp. xi-xxv both provide excellent summaries of the structure of In New York. All references to Halpern are to Hellerstein's edition.[back] Wolitz, p. 62.[back] Klein's alteration of the title of "Di zun vet aruntergayn" (literally 'The Sun Will Go Down") to "The Golden Parrot" is confusing. Presumably what he meant was "The Golden Peacock", which, while it is obviously not a literal translation, would at least make sense in that it is both the symbol of Yiddish folk song and the title of Halpern's second collection. The fragment which Klein calls "Last Will and Testament" is in fact, simply the last stanza of section xxv of "A nakht".[back] See especially sections four and five of In New York, "Ovnt", and "A nakht".[back] I am indebted to Goldie Morgentaler for suggesting this point to me and for her invaluable assistance with my Yiddish.[back] Klein was not alone in his perception of the situation. Abraham Tabachnik's celebrated defense of modern Yiddish poetry, "Tradition and Revolt in Yiddish Poetry", in Voices From the Yiddish, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 289-299, focuses on precisely this point.[back] "Those Who Should Have Been Ours", Literary Essays and Reviews, p. 247.[back] "Baal Shem in Modern Dress", Literary Essays and Reviews, p. 7. See also: "The Poetry Which is Prayer", pp. 49-52, and "Poet of a World Passed By", pp. 79-81.[back] Letter to Shmuel Niger, January 21, 1941.[back] |