Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  Thus the somber matter of Sholem Aleichem’s comedy. Tevye’s dicta run all through it: what he thinks about God (“Why doesn’t He do something? Why doesn’t He say something?”), about wickedness (“My problem was men. Why did they have to be so bad when they could just as well have been good?”), about the goals of life (“to do a little good in His world before you die—to give a bit of money to charity, to take someone needy under your wing, even to sit down with educated Jews and study some Torah”), about the situation in Russia (“pogroms in Kishinev, riots, troubles, the new Constantution* [Constitution]. . . God wanted to do us Jews a favor and so He sent us a new catastrophe, a Constantution”), about education (“I’d sooner eat a buttered pig than sit down to a meal with an illiterate. A Jew who can’t read a Jewish book is a hundred times worse than a sinner”), about reserve (“secretive people annoy me”), about opportunity (“A cow can sooner jump over a roof than a Jew get into a Russian university! . . . they guard their schools from us like a bowl of cream from a cat”), about faith and resignation (“A Jew has to hope. So what if things couldn’t be worse? That’s why there are Jews in the world!”), about what to do with money if one ever got any (“make a contribution to charity that would be the envy of any rich Jew”), about ignorance, love, decency, poverty, misery, anti-Semitism, and the tardiness of the Messiah.

  “The Railroad Stories,” the second half of the Halkin volume, are similar in their use of a monologic narrator, and certainly in their cheerless subject matter. The storyteller of “Baranovich Station” sums up what Jews traveling by train—men scrambling for a living—talk about: “From the Revolution we passed to the Constitution, and from the Constitution it was but a short step to the pogroms, the massacres of Jews, the new anti-Semitic legislation, the expulsion from the villages, the mass flight to America, and all the other trials and tribulations that you hear about these fine days: bankruptcies, expropriations, military emergencies, executions, starvation, cholera, Perushkevich [the founder of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds]. . .” If we did not absolutely grasp it before, we can profoundly recognize it now: Sholem Aleichem’s is a literature of crisis.

  And yet “The Railroad Stories,” in their slightness and vitality and scattershot abundance—there are twenty of them—strike with a comic sharpness that to my mind exceeds even the effervescent artistry of the Tevye tales. Tevye’s voice is elastic, simultaneously innocent and knowing, never short on acuteness of energy or observation or ironic fervor; but “The Railroad Stories,” perhaps because they are largely unfamiliar to us and have never been contaminated by reductiveness, yield the plain shock of their form. Their form is all plotless trajectory: one doesn’t apprehend the mark until after the mark has been hit. To come on these stories with no inkling of their existence beforehand (I imagine this will be the experience of numbers of readers) is to understand what it is to marvel at form—or formlessness—in the hands of literary genius. There are pronounced resemblances to early Chekhov and to Babel and Gorky, as well as a recognizable source—the casual sketch that is the outgrowth of the feuilleton, here strengthened and darkened by denser resonances. Nevertheless the landscape is for the most part uniquely Sholem Aleichem’s, a Russia not easily duplicated even by the sympathetic Chekhov, who in his letters could now and then toss off an anti-Semitic crack as lightly as a shrug. The most Chekhovian of these stories, “Eighteen from Pereshchepena”—a vignette of comic misunderstanding that, when untangled, is seen to be tragic—appears at first to be about the quota system in schools, but actually turns on the dread of forced military service: the eighteen Jewish youths “taken” from the town of Pereshchepena are revealed to be unlucky conscripts, not lucky students. “The Wedding That Came Without Its Band” lustily caricatures a pogrom that doesn’t come off: a trainload of hooligans, “in full battle gear, too, with clubs, and tar,” get so drunk—“the conductor and the stoker and even the policeman”—that they are left behind by the locomotive intended to carry them to their prey. In “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah,” a venturesome Jew named Berl and an anti-Semitic priest find themselves improbably but perilously alone together aboard a runaway engine; the priest, exasperated with Berl, threatens to push him off. “Just look at the difference, Father, between you and me,” says Berl, as the engine hurtles wildly on. “I’m doing my best to stop this locomotive, because I’m trying to save us both, and all you can think of is throwing me out of it—in other words, of murdering your fellow man!” An antic moral fable, wherein the priest is shamed and tamed. But there are plenty of Jewish rascals too—con men and cardsharps and thieves, and a pimp and a cowardly apostate and even an insurance arsonist; and desolate Jews—a teen-age suicide, a desperate father who pursues a Gentile “professor of medicine” to beg him to tend his dying boy, Jews without residence permits who risk arrest by sneaking into town to see a doctor.

  All these characters, whether avoiding or perpetrating pogroms, whether hostile or farcical or pathetic or paradoxical, are flushed with the rosiness of comedy. Comedy, the product of ridicule, is too brittle a mode in the absence of compassion, and too soppy a mode in the absence of briskness. Sholem Aleichem is always brisk and always ready to display just enough (sparing) kindliness to keep the tone on the far side of soppiness. Here he is, in “Third Class,” matter-of-fact without coldness, satiric without meanness, loving without mawkishness:

  When you go third class and wake up in the morning to discover that you’ve left your tefillin and your prayer shawl at home, there isn’t any cause for alarm—you only need to ask and you’ll be given someone else’s, along with whatever else you require. All that’s expected of you in return, once you’re done praying, is to open your suitcase and display your own wares. Vodka, cake, a hard-boiled egg, a drumstick, a piece of fish—it’s all grist for the mill. Perhaps you have an apple, an orange, a piece of strudel? Out with it, no need to be ashamed! Everyone will be glad to share it with you, no one stands on ceremony here. . . . Before long each of us not only knows all about the others’ troubles, he knows about every trial and tribulation that ever befell a Jew anywhere. It’s enough to warm the cockles of your heart!

  The close-knittedness—or huddling, or nestling—of frequently threatened poor Jews, collectively and individually powerless, who bloom in the fond and comradely safety of fellow Jews on a train; the caustic notion of adversity as one’s oldest intimate; trials and tribulations that nevertheless warm the cockles—this is Sholem Aleichem defining, so to speak, the connotations of his nom de plume. That these ironies can rise so pungently from the translated page testifies to how clear and broad an opening Hillel Halkin has bored into the original, where psychological sighs and skeptical gestures are more slender than a hair, or else hidden—a grain here, a grain there—in the crannies of language. A translator’s triumph occurs when the reader comes away from the text in the security of having been given a reasonable measure of access. Halkin now and then achieves much more than the merely reasonable—a true bridge across languages, happy moments like this: “Menachem Mendel was his name: a wheeler, a dealer, a schemer, a dreamer, a bag of hot air.” Or this: “He called him a scoundrel, a degenerate, a know-nothing, a leech, a bloodsucker, a fiend, a traitor, a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Such jubilant and exuberant flights let us know without question that we have been catapulted right inside what Maurice Samuel once called “the world of Sholem Aleichem.”

  But even where there is generous overall access, there can be problems and irritations. Especially with Sholem Aleichem, tone is everything. Halkin’s work, stemming perhaps from his frank belief in “untranslatabilities,” is too often jarred by sudden clangs that do violence to both tongues, bringing on startling distractions in the English while derailing our expectations of the Yiddish. Either we are in Sholem Aleichem’s milieu or we are not—that is the crux. To transmute Sholem Aleichem’s easy idiomatic language into familiar slang is not necessarily a bad or inept solution; it requires of the translator a facile and supp
le ear, alert to the equation of idioms in two cultures. And it isn’t that Hillel Halkin lacks such an ear; just the opposite. What he lacks, I am afraid, is an instinct for what is apropos. American street talk is preposterous in the mouths of people in a forest outside Yehupetz on the way to Boiberik—and the more skillfully and lavishly these relaxed Americanisms are deployed, the more preposterous they seem. “He looks at me like the dumb bunny he is,” “I blew in this morning,” “It drives me up the wall,” “holy suffering catfish!”—absurd locutions for poor Jews in a Russian railway carriage at the turn of the century, especially in the company of the occasional British “quite” and a stilted “A black plague take them all” (a stock imprecation that in Yiddish stings without sounding rococo). And what are we to do with a Tevye who is “bushed,” who downs his brandy with “Cheers!” (even Fiddler stuck by I’khayim), who tells someone, “You’re off your trolley”? With ripe improbability the Jews on the train say “the gospel truth,” “doesn’t that beat all for low-downness,” “tried to pin such a bum rap on me,” “you’re all bollixed up,” “some meatball he was,” “a federal case,” and, painfully, for dancing, “everyone cut the rug up.” Somewhere there is an agonizing 1940s “swell.” Under such an assault, tone collapses and imagination dies.

  But these are phrases snatched out of context. Here, by contrast, is a bit of dialogue between Tevye and his daughter Chava concerning Chvedka, the young Gentile she will eventually run off with:

  “Well, then,” I say, “what sort of person is he? Perhaps you could enlighten me.”

  “Even if I told you,” she says, “you wouldn’t understand. Chvedka is a second Gorky.”

  “A second Gorky?” I say. “And who, pray tell, was the first?”

  “Gorky,” she says, “is only just about the most important man alive.”

  “Is he?” I say. “And just where does he live, this Mr. Important of yours? What’s his act and what makes him such a big deal?”

  In the Yiddish, Tevye’s bitterness is less elaborately spoken, and effectively more cutting. Instead of “Perhaps you could enlighten me,” Tevye comes back with a curt “Let’s hear,” all the more biting for its brevity. “Pray tell,” absent in the original, is too fancy; Tevye grunts out his sardonic helplessness in a single fricative, a zhe attached to the sentence’s opening word. This zhe, in no way portable into English, is nonetheless rawly expressive, and deserves better than the tinkle of Halkin’s “Pray tell.” But the real blow to Tevye’s language (and his moral cosmos) is struck in the last line quoted above, which, in the light of the Yiddish original, is insupportably charmless and hollow—lingo far too carelessly parochial to reflect Tevye’s sufferings in a pharaonic Russia. Agreed, the original is intimidating. “Vu zitst er, der tone dayner, vos iz zayn gesheft un vosfar a droshe hot ergedarshnt}” Literally, “Where does he sit, that tone of yours, how does he get his living, and what kind of a droshe has he preached?” A tone is one of the classical scholastics known as tannaim, whose hermeneutics appear in the Mishnah, a collection of sixty-three tractates of law and ethics that constitute the foundation of the Talmud; a droshe is a commentary, often formidably allusive, prepared by a serious student of homiletics. For Tevye to compare a Russian peasant boy, whose father he judges to be a swineherd and a drunk, with the most influential sages of antiquity is bruising sarcasm—and not only because Chvedka’s family outlook is so remote from the impassioned patrimony of Jewish learning.

  More appositely, Tevye is making the point that the Gorky he has never heard of stands as a mote in relation to that patrimony. From Tevye’s perspective—and his perspective always includes historical memory, with its emphasis on survival and continuity—Chava, in pursuing Chvedka, is venturing into the transgressions of spiritual self-erasure; Tevye is altogether untouched by that cosmopolitan Western liberalism that will overwhelmingly claim his deracinated descendants. In half a moment, the dialogue has moved from the joke of “a second Gorky” to the outcry of a crumbling tradition wherein a secular Russian author is starting to assume major cultural authority for Jews. However difficult it may be for a translator to convey all this—so complex and hurtful a knot of social and emotional attitudes ingeniously trapped in a two-syllable word—it is certain that Halkin’s “this Mr. Important of yours,” with its unerring echoes of old radio programs (Molly Goldberg, Fred Allen’s Mrs. Nussbaum), has not begun to achieve a solution.

  Even so, given its strengths, this volume is likely to serve as the indispensable Sholem Aleichem for some time to come.

  Published in The New Yorker, March 28, 1988

  *Patricia Blake, a Babel scholar, notes that at the time of his arrest Babel was engaged in translating Sholem Aleichem into Russian. The manuscript was confiscated by the NKVD.

  *Possibly a pun on Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, an influential anti-Semite of the time. (I am indebted to Abraham J. Karp for this insight.)

  A Translator’s Monologue

  I should like to arrive at some general propositions about translating poetry. There are three points to remember about these propositions: first, they are important; second, they are useful; and third, they are false.

  It is their falseness I want to consider above all. Everyone knows the legend of how the Septuagint—the oldest Greek version of the Hebrew Bible—came to be written: seventy sages, we are told, entered seventy separate chambers, and emerged with seventy copies of an identical text.

  This is of course a false tale: but its falseness teaches us something significant about how to look at a translated text. If a translation seems flawless, we take it to be authoritative; if it is authoritative, we trust its importance; if we can trust its importance, we know it will be useful. And by “useful” I mean that a translation can serve as a lens into the underground life of another culture.

  Translation is not only feasible but inescapable—good translation, exact translation, superb translation: the entire carrying over from one language to another, from one society to another. But in order to believe in the real possibility of translation, the translator must believe in certain impossible theses. These are, as I have said, important, useful, and false.

  The first false idea is the most indispensable. It is simply that the poem is not “translated,” but uncovered. The seventy sages were able to go into seventy different rooms and come out with a single text because that single text was already there. It had only to be found.

  In the same way, just as the poem already exists, so does the right, faithful, and true translation already exist, needing only to be uncovered. The translated poem is inherent in the new language. It must be hewn out of the new language as (to turn to a strong but familiar image) a figure locked in the recalcitrant rock is hewn out and revealed.

  This commanding proposition, which is both Platonic and false, is also important and useful.

  It is important because without this belief a translation can never be seen as a thing achieved, concluded, finished; it will be regarded as merely a try in a series of tries, as an approach, an attempt, an approximation, a probability, a “version” selected out of a myriad of other versions.

  But when we read a poem in translation, we want to feel we are reading the poem itself. We do not want to feel suspicious or unsure. We want to hand ourselves over to the givenness of the poem, and to rest in the authority of its being.

  Another way of putting this is to say that a translation must be complete, and must be felt to be complete.

  A translation that is tentative or “interim” is useless to the reader. For the translator it is like sewing with a thread that has no knot.

  There is another purpose in believing in the false proposition that a translation of a poem pre-exists. It touches on the mutual obligations of translator and poem. Is the translator the poem’s tenant or its landlord? If the translator is the poem’s tenant, the translator is obligated to the poem for its heat. If the translator is the poem’s landlord, the poem is obligated to the transla
tor for its shape. Now at this point one must stop and think sympathetically of the poet, the maker of the original poem in its original language. Does the poet want to share ownership of the poem with the translator? When we read some of the Russian emigrant writers, say, commenting nastily on the inadequacies of their translators, we can see that often enough the poet demands that translation not be independently equivalent or parallel, but subordinate and slavish.