“No One Will Read My Mother’s Letters”: Reverse Engineering the Poetry of Avot Yeshurun

• In Event: Yiddish Transmissions: Electricity, Sound, Translation

Abstract

The poetry of Avot Yeshurun (Originally: Yehiel Perlmutter) has long been recognized for its unique multilingual Hebrew style. Born in Eastern Europe and immigrated to Palestine in 1925, Yeshurun wrote in Hebrew that at times overflowed with inserts and references from Arabic, Polish, and above all Yiddish. The role of Yiddish is perhaps most prominent in his 1964 book Shloshim amud shel Avot Yeshurun (Thirty Page of Avot Yeshurun), where the poet relies heavily on Yiddish family letters, using them as the foundation of the book, in a mode that Adriana Jacobs termed “prosthetic translation”. This paper will look at these rarely read letters, offering a close reading of the origins of the 1964 book. I will present first ever full and comprehensive translations of these letters, part of a book project that pairs the thirty poems of Shloshim amud with thirty family letters that correspond with, contribute to, the formation of these 1964 poems. In the translation of these letters from the Yiddish I look not only at traces of the Yiddish language in the Hebrew poems, but also at the complex correspondence Yeshurun is holding with his now deceased family members, and the ways in which the poet is belatedly answering these letters through poetry. This book, I argue, is a book about time, in the composition of which Yeshurun is contemplating and bridging a temporal gap, many temporal gaps: Between the time a letter is sent to the time it arrives, between the time it arrives and the time it is answered and, above all, between 1930’s Poland and 1960’s Israel, a belated consideration of loss. In a translation focused reading of this poetry, I call attention to the temporalties of translation as reveled in this unique book: how Yeshurun talks with and through his family across time, using their letters as raw lingual material to create an epistolary drama. In this I show how his use and translation of his family’s words promises that their letters will have readers, as along as his own poetry does.

Author

• Yaakov Herskovitz, Tel Aviv University