Peretz Markish was one of the brashest Yiddish poets of his day. The Forty-Year-Old Man (Der Fertsikyeriker Man), Markish’s long poem comprised of 80 sections with precisely 12 couplets in each, underscores his modernist aesthetics and avant garde stylistic techniques.

To read The Forty-Year-Old Man is to experience an exercise in contradictions: the style is at once radical and conventional, experimental yet contained. For example, Markish inverts linguistic norms, often by truncating words, so that they transmute into something new, something fabricated. Or the word remains recognizable, but its function within the sentence is transformed, so that a verb may turn abruptly into an adjective, or a noun into an adverb – though the same word may switch back to its regular function in the next line or section, creating a sort of inverted mirror effect. All this is emblematic of Markish’s bold experimentalism. Imagine what this does to a translator!

Yet one need only skim the pages of the poem to notice its conservative bent. The poem is contained. Every section features the exact same number of lines, and most of the lines rhyme. Although the rhyme can be sloppy (the words refuse to be as contained as they’re meant to be), the meter is precise — the entire poem written in tetrameter. Daring as Markish may have been, he was still cognizant of the realities of Soviet conventions. Writing in tetrameter, with perfectly spaced stanzas, placed him within the acceptable parameters of Soviet poetry of his time, which in turn, allowed him the freedom of experimenting with words, syntax, and imagery.

Indeed, his imagery can be astonishing, particularly his anthropomorphizing of objects or nature. Consider:

 The day walks bowed yet firm on the road / Flies bite into it for nourishment

 The hands are screws, they bolt themselves / to the mountain of joy, to the mountain of pain

 A day like a watermelon split in half / Juice and light spilling from it 

Much of the imagery, like much of the poem itself, is esoteric and enigmatic, presenting a particular challenge for the translator of his work. Markish makes no attempt to elucidate his reader. He drops the image onto the page, and there it is intended to operate both as a discrete object and as part of the larger structure of the poem. Translating Markish’s work, therefore, involves decision-making not only of the caliber that typify the work of any literary translator—remaining faithful (or not) to the text, finding the mot juste, etc.—but also about how much to attempt to understand. Must the meaning of the poem’s symbolism and imagery in the text be penetrated and interpreted, or is its music on the page sufficient? What’s more, do the words’ enigmatic quality enrich the poem’s beauty, rendering any interpretation or explanation unnecessary, or worse, detrimental to the text?  

As a translator, I have struggled with all these questions. In the end, I’ve attempted to understand Markish’s symbolism and imagery—particularly those alluding to Jewish and Biblical concepts, which the poem is rife with—to the degree I was able. Although I have mostly selected to allow the imagery to do its own work on the page, much as in the Yiddish original, my understanding of what the metaphors represent (wherever I was able to decipher them) can only, I believe, add depth to Markish’s rich artistic achievement. 

–Rose Waldman 

Note: In the penultimate line of Section #5 below, there’s the intriguing phrase “an aleph in the mouth.” When I initially read the phrase, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Then, to my delight, I found a wonderful explanation in an essay by Harriet Murav:

“Peretz Markish in the 1930s: Socialist Construction and the Return of the Luftmensh.” According to Murav, the phrase refers to the “legendary Golem, most famously associated with the sixteenth-century Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague. On its forehead is inscribed emes, the Hebrew and Yiddish word for truth, spelled alef-mem-sof [אמת]. Every night the letter alef [א] must be removed, thus turning the Golem into a mes, a corpse, spelled mem-sof [מת], lest the Golem overpower his human creators. Every morning the alef must be reinscribed in order to bring the Golem back to life. In contrast to the silent Golem of Jewish legend, Markish’s Soviet Golem says his alef out loud, proclaiming his freedom from the past and from his rabbinic creators.”

In Section #5 of The Forty-Year-Old Man, it is the youth that demands and implements change. It is they—holding the aleph in their mouth and the stars of the sky in their homespun kerchiefs—who proclaim their freedom from the past, thus helping to usher in the Utopian life Markish was so sure was coming.