On Heathen Footsteps
Eisig Silberschlag
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Sun and wind and sea And your body burning on sand, Sun and wind and sea And your body's wordless demand, Sun and wind and sea And your body in power of it all, Sun and wind and sea— Ah, a life without God, without thrall.
Audio recording of me reading the original Hebrew:
Yahweh's servants! Praise O praise the name of Yahweh. Blessed be the name of Yahweh now and evermore From the source of dawn to the seat of sundown praised be His name. High over all nations, Yahweh; and over the heavens His glory Who is there like Yahweh our God throned on high, Looking below on heavens and earth? Raiser of paupers from dust, from dungheaps lifting the needy, to seat him with princes, the princes of his people, and seating the barren woman at home a mother of sons in joy.
Audio recording of me chanting the original in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation:
(I must say, trying to follow the Talmudic prescriptions for the reading of Hallel psalms in the early synagogue made things a bit long-winded in this one with all the responsory Halaluyahs after every half-verse. I figured I'd alternate them with upward and downward motifs. That way, highlighting the structure of the verse-line, they at least have a job to do.)
The audio recording for this is a little different from my usual Tiberian Hebrew recordings. See the note below for more. Psalm 117
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Praise Yahweh, nations all Salute Him, peoples all For His kindness prevails upon us and Yahweh's truth is forever. Praise the Lord.
Audio recording of me chanting the original in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation:
A friend pointed out to me — in connection with the reading of this and other Hallel psalms — that the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 38b and also Tractate Sofrim believed to be composed in Palestine) and, in a more oblique way, the Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 16) inform us as to the specifics of communal participation in the chanting of the hallel psalms in the early synagogue. Specifically, they state that it was done with the first helf-verse as a call-response, then with the rest as a responsory with הללויה. I am uncertain as to whether the song-final instance of הללויה in the actual text is to be treated as its own half-verse for these purposes (and thus get a responsory הללויה before and after it) or if the reader is to read the whole påsūq up to הללויה on his own uninterrupted, and then be answered by a final הללויה in response. I figure the former, more orthopractically fastidious reading would be likely to crop up anyhow no matter what so I went with that. The practice is I understand not common today, but the inference I take (given that not only the Talmuds attest this, but Rambam endorses it) is that people living in the Land of Israel during the Masoretic period — the actual user-base of the Tiberian reading tradition — would likely have chanted the hallel psalms in this fasion. So I figured, why not incorporate that into my Tiberian reading of this psalm? It's a simple matter of recording on multiple tracks and rhythmicizing the cantillation in a way proper to psalmodic delivery. On hearing the result, a certain person, who shall remain anonymous, remarked "wow, that sounds so Christian". Make of that what you will. To me, fact that I managed to produce something Christian-sounding simply by following directives from Rambam and the Sages of the Talmud, is absolutely hysterical. The Original:
"Happy the Man"
Psalm 1
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Happy the man who has not walked as the wicked counsel nor sat in scoffers' sessions nor stood the wrongers' way. But makes Yahweh's teaching his desire and murmurs His teaching night and day. He is to be as a tree planted by water streams that bears its fruit in season with never-withering leaf, and thrive in every thing he does. Not so the ungodly wicked, but like chaff wind whips away. So no the wicked shall not stand in judgment, nor wrongers with the righteous host. For Yahweh grasps the way of the righteous and the wicked's way is lost.
Audio recording of the original text chanted in Tiberian Hebrew:
(Note for people who haven't read Dune: this is just me screwing around)
Discovered unvocalized in a Qumran fragment. A vocalized version was found palimpsested in Aharon Ben Asher's recipe book.
Audio recording of the "original" text chanted in Tiberian Hebrew:
Prayer of the Sons of Gesserit
Translated by A.Z. Foreman A prayer of the Sons of Gesserit at a time of trouble. I must not fear. For fear is the mind's murderer. Fear is the little death that turns To end my life over and over. Without fear, I will die only once. The Original:
This may or may not be a very old text, but I think it is. As befits an old text, there are points of obscurity. Scholarly opinion is much divided as to what exactly it is: a taunt-song celebrating an Israelite victory over Sihon, an ancient Amorite victory-song celebrating Sihon's victory over Moab, an Israelite victory song celebrating the conquest of Moab, or a taunt-song referring to the defeat of Moab by some non-Israelite enemy. The great uncertainty is a function of the obscurity of several components of the last verse, where a text that ceased to be intelligible spawned multiple different attempts to make sense of it. As far as the redactor of the prose text is concerned, it celebrates an Amorite victory over Moab. Its purpose in the Book of Numbers does not seem mysterious. Heshbon was a great Amorite city, apparently famous in song for how its king wrested land from the Moabites. For the Israelites to be written into the story as a people that did to Sihon what he did to Moab magnifies their stature, and de-fangs the song of Sihon's accomplishments into mere prelude to his downfall. At some point before the close of the Masoretic period, this ceased to be understood, resulting in a revocalization of the key word ונירם as if it were a verb and messing up the rhythm.
If it is an adaptation into Judean Canaanite of a passage from what was once a well-known Amorite epic, it may be counted the first known instance of literary translation in Jewish history. Then again, I'm not quite sure the party that sutured this passage into the Book of Numbers even conceived of Amorite and Judean as entitely different languages from each other. It's tempting, but probably pointless, to ask how different might the "real" original have been. Perhaps enormously, and perhaps not very.
At verse 28 I emend בלעה for בעלי per the LXX and follow a version of Hanson's reconstruction in this and much else including the ending. At 17 the MT's parsing of the opening of the poetic passage is screwy. The Masoretic accents make perfectly good sense as is (something like "Come to Heshbon! Let the city of Sihon be built and stand firm.") But poetically it seems like it would work better to shift the ʔaṯnåḥ over to תבנה. (This would require making באו חשבון a level 2 conjunctive-disjunctive unit, and letting ותכונן stand as an unbound disjunctive.) So hypothetically, I think: בֹּ֥אוּ חֶשְׁבּ֖וֹן תִּבָּנֶ֑ה וְתִכּוֹנֵ֖ן עִ֥יר סִיחֽוֹן׃. This gives a neater syntactic balance, and the two clauses stand in chiastic relationship to each other. Perhaps the habit of joining תיבנה ותיכנה (as e.g. when mentioning Jerusalem among some Mizrahim, as a friend informs me) gave the Masoretes a sense — at a late date — that those two verbs had to stand as a single conjunctive-disjunctive phrase.
I have translated the text according to this hypothetical reconstruction of the original parsing, and with heavy emendation. But in my recording, I have allowed the Masoretic text to stand as is. This is because, when I do Tiberian readings to accompany my translations of Biblical verse, my principle is to let the MT stand in the audio reading without emendation of any kind— no matter how obviously garbled a given word or passage may be. The Tiberian reading is a descendant of, and liturgical heir to, the "proto-Masoretic" reading tradition cultivated in priestly circles of the Second Temple. Particular effort was expended to stabilize and preserve it in the Middle Ages (obviously, without success). Tiberian Hebrew being the most direct heir to the priestly reading of the temple, it seems proper for a reading in it to respect the Masoretic text with all its quirks and wrinkles.
I've translated the poetic passage into a slightly loose accentual alliterative meter of the kind known from early Germanic.
Audio recording of the original text read in Tiberian Hebrew:
The Song of Heshbon: The Amorites' Defeat of Moab
Numbers 21:26-30
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Heshbon is the city of Sihon, king of the Amorites. He had battled the first king of Moab and wrested all the land from him as far as the Arnon. So the tale-singers tell it:
Come to Heshbon be it built high Let the city of Sihon stand unshaken. A fire has burst forth from Heshbon, A flame from the town of towering Sihon. It consumed all of Ar in Moab, swallowed whole the heights of Arnon. Woe is you wallowing Moab. People of Chemosh your kind is done. He has turned his sons to sorry refugees surrendered his daughters as slaves to a king to the Amorite sire, to King Sihon. Their yoke is done from Heshbon to Dibon. Chemosh annulled from Nofah to Medba.
The dating of the Song of the Sea is a matter of some dispute. There is a widely held view that it is extremely old, on linguistic grounds. Indeed, the language of this song is more consistently archaic than any other coherent long passage of the Hebrew Bible. There is nonetheless a robust tradition of positing a relatively late (i.e. post-exilic) date for the Exodus 15. These all hinge on an ability to discount the archaisms as being intentional, the result of a late composer's (apparently uniquely successful) attempt to compose in an old style rather than an early composer using the language as it existed at the time.
The tendency for poetic language to tend toward, or preserve, archaic language more than prose does (e.g. Latin and Greek at every period, Old English, 18th Century English, French, Modern Welsh, Arabic, Modern Hebrew, Dutch, etc.) is so robustly attested cross-linguistically that it can be taken for granted as a commonplace of human linguistic behavior. Elaborations of this staggeringly banal fact have been used on the regular to try and argue a late date for all manner of apparently archaic compositions, and Exodus 15 is among their number, the most extensive case (and, for me, by far the most irritating) being the decades-long attempt of literary historians to argue for a late text of Beowulf.
Of course, there also exists the opposite tendency: arguing an early date for a text which on linguistic grounds cannot belong to that period. This involves claims that the text got partly modernized in transmission. There is general consensus on this matter regarding a lot of Old Irish poetry. Another Celtic case in point is the scholarship surrounding Y Gododdin, a Welsh poem which survives in a 13 century manuscript but is traditionally attributed to the 6th century Brythonic poet Aneirin. (Well, he is traditionally called a Welsh poet, but his stomping ground would actually lie in what is today Scotland.) The idea in this case is that the material was heavily modernized in transmission, leaving only portions of earlier language intact.
Literary attempts to project a late date onto a text in transparently early langauge always mean situating the text in an era which we know more about. This may be a large part of the appeal of such an approach. Thus for example Brenner's thesis that Ex. 15 was composed for the Passover feast during the Second Temple Period is father to his dismissal of all of the seeming archaisms as intentional stylistic options. But no other Biblical Hebrew poem really looks like this. We've no affirmative evidence that someone in the Second Temple period, trying to compose something new, would intentionally produce such a text with such a heavy and consistent freight of archaisms. All the archaic elements of Exodus 15 can be found individually in other — often late — poetic material but never with the same consistency and concentration in this fashion all together. If you knew nothing of the Song of the Sea, but knew the other poetic material of the Pentateuch as well as the more archaic of the psalms, you would never be able to use them as a model from which to derive the archaic style of Exodus 15 which just so happens to be supported by material in other Semitic languages. When late Biblical poets try to be archaic, they don't produce material that looks like this, and the most straightforward explanation is that they were either not able, or not inclined, to do so. Why should a late author of the Song of the Sea be so stylistically radical as to use archaic constructions in precisely the way that someone using an early form of Canaanite naturally would?
Anyway I think that the text really is an early poem, not a late poet's attempt to compose in an otherwise unattested archaic style. Here's a fun trick to try. If you run the sound-changes in reverse, you can get some sense of what it may have sounded like early on at some point in early Iron Age Judah. Given how speculative it is (relative chronology is one thing, but with absolute chronology?) I hesitate to call this a reconstruction of anything. The word would have to drop the prefix to describe it. It is definitely a construction. Of what, though, Dagon only knows.
As with all my translations of poetry from the Hebrew Bible, and poetry from early medieval Palestine, I am including audio recordings in Tiberian Hebrew. (Since I have gone and learned to read Hebrew in this fashion in order to produce an audio-companion for a book about this now-dead Hebrew liturgical dialect, and then lent my voice to a whole website about it, I figure I might as well get some use out of it.) I have included Exodus 14.30-31 in the text here, translated as as a small-font preface. The tail end of Ex. 14 forms the context in which Jewish readers since the Middle Ages have most commonly encountered Song, which is to say in prayer books, where it is grouped in with the Pesūqē deZimrā which may be said every day during the Šaḥarīt (Morning Prayer). Since I was including a Tiberian (i.e. medieval) reading, it seemed fitting to follow the siddurim and include Ex. 14:30-31 as a preface. Oh and here's an IPA transcription of the Tiberian Reading.
Here's a recording of me chanting the beginning (through 15:5) in Tiberian Hebrew, using the Temani Shira mode:
Here's a recording the whole text in a speaking voice
Song of the Sea
Exodus [14:30-15:1-18]
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
And on that day did Yahweh deliver Israel from the hand of Egypt, and Israel see Egypt dead on the seashore. Israel saw what great handiwork Yahweh had wrought down on Egypt, and the people feared Yahweh, and trusted in Yahweh and in His slave Moses. Then did Moses and the Israelites sing this song for Yahweh. They said:
Sing1 for Yahweh for his coup of splendor: Horse and horseman he hurled to the sea. Yahweh is my strength and stave2 he became my salvation. This god is mine whom I exalt, god of my father whom I extol: Yahweh the war man3.Yahweh is his name. Pharaoh's forces4 he flung to the sea His pick of captains pitched in the Reed Sea. The depths whelmed them over They were downed in the deep like stone Your right hand, Yahweh is majestic and right. Your right hand, Yahweh, shatters enemies. In ultimate splendor you felled those against You. Fired forth your fury to combust them like straw. At your nostrils' flare the waters heaped, The waves like mounds stood up. The deep congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said "I'll pursue, I'll subdue I will share out the spoils, my gullet will glut on them I will draw my sword, my hand despoil them." But you blew forth your breath and sea whelmed them over. They went like lead, down in the mighty water. Who is like you, Yahweh among the gods? Who is like you awesome among the holy? Awe-bringerhymn-hearer Wreaker of wonders! You stretched your right hand and earth gulped them under, You guided in your kindness that folk you redeemed, In your strength led their road To your holy abode. Peoples heard and as peoples quaked, The dwellers of Plesheth throttled with anguish. The chieftains of Edom panicked. The sires of Moab seized with shudders The kings of Canaan quailed and melted. Down upon them fell every horror; Your brawned arm loomed and they were like stone As your people crossed over, Lord Yahweh, As the people you made your creation crossed over. You brought them to plant them on the mount you bequeathed, The ground you deemed your dwelling, Yahweh The sanctum O Lord your hand founded. All hail Lord Yahweh King for all time.
1 - I have emended the opening with the verson from Ex. 15:21
2 - the character string יהויהי is probably best divided as יהו יהי.
3 - The Pšiṭṭā gives a translation implying יהוה גיבור במלחמה which is also found in the Samaritan Pentateuch. The LXX has Κύριος συντρίβων πολέμους "The Lord who shatters wars" which has been written about a great deal. There are three possibilities for the LXX. (a) it reflects — in translation — a radically pious intervention against the anthropomorphism of the MT version, (b) it reflects a slightly pious rendering of something like the Samaritan version (with the ב particle understood in the sense "against"), or (c) it reflects a variant which has left no trace elsewhere (and therefore the pious intervention lies not in the translation but its Vorlage). The real possibility of (c) should be kept in mind. Consider that while the Vulgate's "Dominus quasi vir pugnator, Omnipotens nomen eius" may reflect a Hebrew text according with the MT in the first half (though the "quasi" is either a bit of minor pious fudging or reflecting a Hebrew text with כאיש instead as in Isa 42:13), the following "Omnipotens nomen eius" seems utterly inexplicable as reflecting anything other than a Herbrew text containing שדי שמו, (which I think actually works nicer as poetry). More's the pity that we have no Qumran text for Exodus 15. In any case, evidently at some point a confusion crept into the tradition which yielded the Samaritan-type version for this line, whether or not it underlies the LXX. As איש מלחמה and גבור are commonly synonymous, conflation of two variants (יהוה איש מלחמה and יהוה גבור) seems like a plausible reason. גבור makes better sense metrically, but איש מלחמה seems to reflect the early anthropomorphism. Anyway, my translation doesn't care about literalism and so this is a bit moot on that score.
4 — metrically, if one were feeling speculative, one might wonder if מרכבת פרעה and פרעה וחיל are ancient variants which have been conflated. I went with the former. Of course, as always, my Tiberian Hebrew reading (meant to be a rendering of the text as it was known to the Tiberian Masoretes of the late first millennium) sticks to the Masoretic Text without any emendations.
The Original:
ויושע יהוה ביום ההוא את־ישראל מיד מצרים וירא ישראל את־מצרים מת על־שפת הים וירא ישראל את־היד הגדלה אשר עשה יהוה במצרים וייראו העם את־יהוה ויאמינו ביהוה ובמשה עבדו: אז ישיר־משה ובני־ישראל את־השירה הזאת ליהוה ויאמרו לאמר שירו ליהוה כי־גאה גאה
Yahweh the Shepherd
Psalm 23
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Yahweh shepherds me I want for naught. He lets me lie down in grassy meadows, He guides me out by quiet waters. He brings my life back. He leads me straight on Justice's footpaths For his name's sake. Though I tread in the death-shadow vale I dread no harm: for you are with me. Your shepherd's crook, Your walking-staff... These things are my solace. You lay out a table to feed me in the face of my foes. You moisten my head with ointment. My cup overflows. Let naught but goodness and kindness flock with me All the days of my life And the House of Yahweh be my abode For many long days.
Audio recording of me chanting the original in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation:
The payṭan Shmu'el ben Hoshaˁna (known also as Hashlishi "the Third", the ultimate rank he attained at the Yeshiva) was one of the central figures of the Eretz Israel Yeshiva in Jerusalem in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and a prolific author of Hebrew liturgical poetry. The Yotzer is a sequence of poems which adorn the benedictions associated with the morning reading of the Shemaˁ.
This brief piyyūṭ is an ahava, the fourth in such a sequence, introducing the second benediction before the Shemaˁ, dealing with God's love for Israel. (Whence Israel as the "beloved" of the final verse). Like many ahavot, it includes an alphabetic acrostic. In this case, though, the letters occur in reverse order, evoking the Resurrection's reversal of death at the end of days. It draws on the Bible heavily for its language, and the effect of its language (e.g. for the ending see Hosea 14:5).
My translation is fairly free and interpretative. For example, the Messiah is not directly mentioned in this poem by that title. Rather his coming is mentioned in oblique form "with (the) Nūn of (the verb) Yinnōn" which means more or less something like "when the Messiah's reign begins" or perhaps "when the Messiah is born" depending on which way you swing the mysticism. Yinnōn is an obscure verb occurring only once in the Hebrew Bible (Ps. 72:17). Some (see e.g. B. Sanhedrin 98b) took it to be the Messiah's name, and Yinnōn is frequently used as a byword for the Messiah in piyyūṭīm. The letter nūn wound up especially associated with the Messiah in this connection, in part on account of the fact that n-w-n was taken to be the verb's root.
An Ahava on the Resurrection
Shmuel Ben Hoshaˁna
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
You turn man back to dust,
but will turn back in kind
with kindness that we hymn.
You will bind back his bones,
extend again his tendons,
defend and fend for him. You will fit him with flesh,
Just a little more Biblical poetry, this time from one of the Twelve "Minor" Prophets. The recording continues my habit of reading the Bible in a reconstruction of medieval Tiberian Hebrew phonology.
Audio recording of me chanting the original text in Tiberian Hebrew
"Why, God?"
Habakkuk 1:1-4
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
The message that came in a vision upon prophet Habakkuk:
How long, O Lord, shall I cry out and You not listen? I shriek OUTRAGE to You, and You do not deliver! Why do You show me horror, tolerate godawful things? Plunder and outrage are all before me combat and conflict all about. So the law is crippled, and justice comes out never. For the wicked are closing in on the good so justice comes out crooked.
Another Biblical one, and again I've included an audio recording of me reading the text in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation. I think I'll do that with all my Biblical Hebrew stuff from now on. By the Streams of Babylon
Psalm 137
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Audio recording of me chanting the original text using reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation
By the streams of Babylon,
There we sat and oh did we weep
When we recalled our Zion.
There, on the branches of the poplars
We hung up our lyres.
For there our captors asked us to sing,
Our plunderers bade us rejoice:
"Sing us one of your Zionite songs!"
But how can we sing the song of Yahweh On foreign soil?
If I should forget you, O Jerusalem,
May my right hand fall paralyzed!
Let my tongue cleave up to my palate
If I do not recall you,
If I do not keep Jerusalem
At the peak of all my joys.
Recall, O Yahweh, the Edomites
On that day of Jerusalem, saying:
"Flatten it, flatten it
Down to the foundation"
O Daughter of Babylon!
Daughter destroyer!
Happy the man who deals in kind
With you as you dealt with us.
Happy the man who seizes and smashes
Your babies against the boulders.
The Seal of Love
Song of Songs [8:5-7]
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Audio recording of me chanting the original text using reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation
(He speaks:) Who is that coming up from the wildlands,
Her head on her lover's shoulder?
(She speaks:)
Beneath the apple tree I aroused you.
Beneath that tree I received you
There where your mother conceived you
Where your mother gave birth to you.
Bind me now as a seal on your heart,
As an amulet upon your arm.
For love is fierce as death,
But jealousy cruel as the grave.
Even its shards are the sparks of fire,
Of an almighty flame.
Whole oceans cannot put love out,
Nor any river sweep it away.
Any man who tried
To barter his live savings for love,
Would be paid in full with shame.
Abraham Turned Human
By Ory Bernstein
Translated by A.Z. Foreman She didn't promise me anything else, Didn't tempt me with a thing or try. Not when I went out ahead of the army and not when the army passed by. One of my sons I sent to die, the other I tried to sacrifice, while I maintained an innocence no longer useful or wise. When all the prophecies come to pass as, for evil, they always do, My eyes like a heifer's eyes will rise pleadingly toward you. Behold my affliction, see how my days are numbered. After all, I was bound to be no more than a happenstance for things to happen around.
Audio of me reciting this translation in English
Audio of me reciting this poem in Hebrew
Commentary with Literal Translation:
Avraham Naˁase Enoši
Abraham Is Made Human
Lo hivṭaḥt li davar šone
lo pitit oti bedavar.
Gam kšeyatsá'ti lifney hamaḥane
Vegam kšehamaḥane ˁavar You didn't promise me any other thing, you did not tempt me with a thing. Both when I went out ahead of the army, and when the army passed. In this first stanza, the second person pronoun forms are feminine, addressing presumably either Sarah or Hagar. Reference to going out ahead of the army alludes to Abraham leading his retainers on a rescue operation. It also invokes wording used in Exodus 14.
Yéled eḥad šaláḥti lamut,
Ve'eḥad nisíti laˁaqod
Vešamárti ˁal temimut
Šelo tesayaˁ li ˁod One son I sent to die, and one I tried to bind, and I preserved an innocence which is not helpful to me anymore. The two sons are of course Ishmael and Isaac. The word temimut "innocence" has biblical overtones not only of naiveté but of purity, Godfear and uprightness.
uxšekol hanvu'ot mitqaymot
vetamid mitqaymot leraˁ
ˁeynay eléyxa muramot
bitḥina, keˁeyney para. And when all the prophecies take place — and they take place for evil — my eyes will be lifted to you in supplication like the eyes of a heifer. Here the addressee is grammatically masculine and may thus refer to either God, Isaac or Jacob. Probably to God. Reference to a heifer invokes a passage from Numbers 14 dealing with the sacrifice of a heifer, an ironic inversion of the story in which Abraham attempts to kill his son at God's request.
re'e oti beˁonyi, re'e
oti kešeyamay nisperu
Haíti, kixlot hakol, raq miqre
šesvivo hadvarim qaru Behold me in my affliction, behold how my days are numbered. I was, after all, just a hap which things happened around. Like "days are numbered" the phrase "behold... in affliction" is a Biblical formula (e.g. Gen 29:32, Exodus 3:7). In the Hebrew Bible, for God to "behold someone in their affliction" implies that God will also have mercy on them and ease their suffering. Here, though, it has an ironic tone. Perhaps something to the effect of: "just look what a screwed-up life I've had. I'm only human and you, Yahweh, manipulated me as a tool. But please take pity on me. I'm at your mercy in this cruel universe." Or at least that's how I read it (heh heh.)
Three years ago Arul Francis made an extremely generous donation, and asked for a poem dealing with a man who is trying to hold on to memories of a mother who has passed, who did not know her as he wishes he could have. I had not been able to find the right poem until today, when I hit on the perfect one. Well, perfect in Hebrew anyway. It's an extremely Israeli poem, and at the same time extremely un-Israeli. My translation at the end is quite free. You might even call it interventionist. I have included a literal translation with a commentary in the vein of "The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself." Because why not. The poem is about Yeshurun's mother Rikl. About her world. Her lost world. And the language (Yiddish) of that world.
A Day Shall Come
By Avot Yeshurun
Translated by A.Z. Foreman Requested by Arul Francis (thank you for your support) A day shall come when nobody will read my mother's letters. There is a pack of them that I have stored. None whose they are. Not one word. A day shall come when nobody will take them by the hand. There is a bundle of them and more galore. They'll say: paper, scrap, And nothing more. That day I'll bring them to the Bar Kokhba caves, set them back Home in strange dust. The old world is too young To re-search there A mother tongue.
A day shall come when no one (lit. not a man) shall read my mother's letters / I have (lit. there is to me) a (whole) box of them / not (one) whose they were (or: nobody's) / and not a word.
The echoes of šel imi (of my mother) and šel mi (whose, the one of whom) and of mila (word) help to weave the opening into a closely connected unit. The speaker does not have his mother. He has her letters, and yet that is not enough for even "a word" of hers to be preserved.
Yom yavo ve'iš lo yiqaḥ otam layad
Yeš mehem tsror vehoter
Yomru: neyar pisat
Velo yoter.
A day shall come when no one (lit. not a man) shall take them in hand/ there is of them a bundle and then some / they will say paper scrap / and no more.
Bayom hahu avi'em el meˁarat bar koxva
Lehaˁalotam ba'avaq. Haˁolam haqodem
Lo yaḥqor ba
sefat em.
On that day I will take them to the Bar Kokhba cave / to set them up in dust. The world of old / will not search (also: study, research) in it (the cave) / mother tongue.
It is not merely the letters, but symbolically his mother herself, which the speaker will inter in the Bar Kokhva caves. (The clitic -em "them" of avi'em "I will bring them" is pronounced identically in Israeli Hebrew to אם em the more formal word for "mother.")
The verb lehaˁalot is loaded. One of its idiomatic senses is "pile with dust, grow covered with dust (or mould)." In that sense it fits with the motif of burial of the dead, or lost, world.
The semantic core of lehaˁalot is actually "raising up" in various ways: elevating, regurgitating, bringing to maturity, bringing something into focus (as in "bringing to light" a matter) so that it may be better understood. It is also the word used to describe the in-gathering of diasporic Jews, helping them make their "ascent" (ˁaliya) to Israel. The ascent to Israel and the interment of the world represented by the Yiddish letters from Yeshurun's mother become inextricable from each other.
The past and present become confounded as we come to haˁolam haqodem, which in the context of burial and loss seems like a back-projected counterpart to the traditional Jewish terms for this life and the next. If haˁolam haba "the world to come" is the afterlife, and and haˁolam haze "this world" is the current life, what then is the ˁolam qodem? Is it the "world of yore" — the autochthonously Hebraic world newly revivified, like the rediscovered ancient letters in the Bar Kokhba caves? Or is it the "former world" of the diasporic Jew, newly forsaken and awaiting interment? The answer to that question is indeterminate, and so too therefore is the referent of the "mother tongue." Does it refer to Yiddish? The ancestral mameloshn, the language of Yeshurun's mother, which is being lost? Or to Hebrew, the ancestral language now renativized to be a mother tongue once again?
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