Translator’s Note: Two Poems by Abraham Sutzkever

In 1973, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, after ghetto survival, guerilla warfare, and post-war wandering, began publishing what he called his “Diary Poems” (“Lider fun togbukh”) in the literary journal that he had founded in Tel Aviv twenty-five years ago and edited till its final issue in 1995. The two poems in this issue are part of that series.

Poems from a diary: the title itself balances public and private. Sutzkever was an active participant, even a history-maker, in the cultural and political life of European Jewry, and then in the nascent State of Israel — but his poetics (unlike that of some of his colleagues) was not politics by other means, but emerged from a parallel realm that partook of the real world without being a subset of it.

Nevertheless, the closeness of the contact between his poems and the outside world varied; more than one critic has seen in the “Diary Poems” a last turn round the helix of Sutzkever’s progression as a poet. After poems about the Jewish underground (“Secret City”) and the Vilna ghetto, poems about Israel (“Dead Sea Poems”), a travelogue to Africa, and occasional essays in his editorial role, his “Diary Poems” were, like his earliest work, a navigation through the landscape of the self.

In some ways this ruminative-philosophical nature makes them harder to translate than poems that are more historical-fantastical. The parallels in English are difficult.

This is work of the “Isn’ts and the There Is” (as he says elsewhere), of the dead who converse with the living, dialogues with anonymous poets and “colleagues,” of a God who is not religious — not the entreated Maker of the Psalmist, but not the cold Creator of the Deists either. It is lyric of the galloping night that can be cured by a potion.

“What Will Stay Behind” is beloved by modern-day singers, but it’s harder to scan than sing. The crux is its last line, perhaps a miniature commentary on the “Diary Poems” in total: “Not enough for you?” No, God is not; the line is not; the translation is not. Or perhaps — not?