Two Jews

Sunday, 21 April, 1996

AN INVOLUNTARY exile, Joseph was a kosmopolit, more avid for world culture than he was curious about Christianity. The Jew- as-writer, it seems to me, is committed to language as such, to the living language. He does not write for the future, even if his writing is "ahead of its time". Nor does he write out of reverence for the past: past and future can take care of themselves. Joseph, of course, was engaged in something else as well, making the two languages more equal, adding, subtracting, but above all mixing. Even before he became a wanderer, Joseph was a transgressor. As a translator, in the wider sense, he crossed and recrossed frontiers. "All poets are Yids", said Tsvetayeva.
     Joseph dispensed with the supposed privileges of victimhood. Jewishness, inescapably identified with persecution, was not likely to appeal to him. He made light of exile, stressing the gains both material and spiritual or intellectual, minimizing the losses. He was clearly scornful of those intellectuals who gathered periodically to discuss such issues, insisting that while the delegates talked, under the auspices of this or that foundation, others were suffering on a scale and to a degree that rendered their complaints laughable, even contemptible. He was not a whiner, and he was quite intolerant of the pervasive "culture of complaint". Naturally, this did nothing for his popularity among fellow exiles. In short, if he made a career, he did not actively make it out of the sufferings he had endured as a Jew or as the victim of a regime that still had totalitarian aspirations.

There are some similarities between us. He left a son and two daughters (one of them born the year of his departure, whom he never saw); I left a son and two daughters. The pain of those separations virtually defined my existence.
    Was he family, as Jill maintained? In that mysterious and at the same time artless way that family is family, perhaps. Which somehow distanced me also from his circle of literary friends and acquaintances, the poets, the publishers, the colleagues, even if, as an occasional translator of his work, I too had professional dealings with him.
    But did Joseph feel that way about me? At the very least, he was ambivalent about my work as a translator, and yet he stuck by me, as in a way I stuck by him as a poet, although I was ambivalent about his poetry. Joseph's views, in particular his insistence on the primacy of form, made him less than tolerant of what he regarded as slapdash practice, associating this with cultural ignorance, irresponsibility, or worse; it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for him, "crimes" against language were almost tantamount to crimes against humanity. And yet, it seems, he forgave me my crimes or sins; surprisingly tolerant, even tender, he held out the prospect of redemption and tried to lead me onto the paths of righteousness! He did not remain neutral, as he might have done, but urged me to continue translating his work, although of course under guidance.
    I resisted. That is, in order to preserve rhymes, I was not prepared deliberately to sacrifice literal accuracy. I railed at Joseph, trying to convince him that, in any case, as a non-native speaker, he could not possibly hear my off-rhymes, my assonances, and that it was perverse of him to insist on strict formal imitation, when this must lead to distortions, preposterous rhyming and, finally, despite all his efforts, major alterations in sense, tone, etc. It infuriated and frustrated me that he refused to be moved by these arguments, which seemed incontrovertible. He would not acknowledge his indebtedness to his anglophone translators, nor honor their sensibility as native speakers. Surely he must realize that you could translate only into your native tongue, especially when it came to poetry. He should chose his translators with care, and be ready to provide them with contextual and linguistic information, but he should not second-guess them or try to manipulate them. On the contrary, he should be guided by them. They, after all, were responsible for the final version. The translation was not - could not be - identical with the original, just as English did not mesh perfectly with the Russian, however much translators of Russian might wish it did. The translation was a derivative text, but it also represented the poem's further life, or one of its several possible further lives. But for it to live in another language it had also to be another poem; in the final analysis, whether he liked it or not, it had also to be the translator's poem.
    Joseph would not be budged. He heard me out, evidently unimpressed by what I had to say, merely repeating from time to time that English was richer in rhyme than was supposed. That is, he seemed stubborn or, one might say, pig-headed, except I could not help feeling a certain compassion for him in this predicament. On the other hand, it was also as if he were just waiting for me to come around, convinced that eventually I must. Under the circumstances, it surprised me that he continued to encourage my forays into Russian poetry, as translator and editor. We could hardly have been more at odds, and yet he behaved (and I behaved) as though this were not so. In a way, it wasn't.
    Complain as I may (and as I did) I would not have wanted to be other than a stranger in America where a different English was spoken, and before that to have been an Englishman who, with his immigrant family, was not echt English. I was, or thought of myself as being, between languages. This made me acutely aware of the provisionally of language, which was a kind of advantage. Language was distinct, apart. For that reason (paradoxically?) its dimensions too were more acutely sensed. This sometimes had the effect of reducing or more sharply focusing existence itself.
    Joseph spoke of language as directing consciousness. For instance: "Reading him [Dostoevsky] simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one's consciousness" ("The Power of the Elements", Less Than One), or: "A poet's biography is in his vowels and sibilants, in his meters, rhymes and metaphors [ ... ]. With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written" ("The Sound of the Tide", Less Than One). (That "the best of them" is rather desperate.) So, presumably, he would have taken a dim view of what I have been saying here. Still, I am not inclined to ignore what he would certainly have regarded as irrelevantly biographical. Languages as something out there, in that one finds oneself between them, is quite a seductive notion. Joseph, though, combined this alienating or hyper-linguistic awareness, a form of self-consciousness really, with a genial determination to know his language(s) literally inside out. A Jew, he was also quite adamant about being a Russian, at least insofar as the Russian language belonged to him and he to it (" From Russian with Love"). I envied him and was a little suspicious of this devotion to the Russian language, if not to Mother Russia, since I did not really feel that way about English. As a Jew, Joseph was able to objectify his apartness from the language. It was this, I dare say, that allowed him to be so entirely devoted to it. One might almost call it romantic love, in that the beloved was unattainable.