Hortulus 37, 1959: Translation as Collaboration in an Anthology of New Poetry from Israel

1 Hortulus 37

On a November afternoon in the mid-1950s, Kassit, the famed Tel Aviv café and gathering place of bohemians, artists, and poets, hosted a guest from abroad: Hans Rudolf Hilty, editor of the Swiss literary journal Hortulus. As Hilty described in the introduction to Hortulus 37 – the 1959 issue subtitled “New Poetry from Israel” (“Neue Dichtung aus Israel”) that was the result of this visit – he had taken an El Al flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, where he enjoyed the warm air, the lively conversation, and the Mediterranean atmosphere.^[1] Hilty was there at the behest of the journal that he had founded in 1951. Not long after the appearance of issue number 37, he wrote a brief piece marking the milestone of the journal’s one-thousandth subscriber, in which he provides an overview of Hortulus’s agenda. Hilty took the subtitle of the journal – “Zweimonatsschrift für neue Dichtung” (Bimonthly Magazine for New Poetry) – seriously, as he aimed primarily to provide a platform for young and unknown authors. Looking back at eight years of publishing, he is particularly proud of the authors that he “discovered,” who were published in Hortulus as young unknowns and went on to win literary prizes and critical acclaim. At the same time, he acknowledges that in the search for new voices he will inevitably publish things that will be forgotten: “A journal that wants to capture poetry as it is coming into being cannot be an anthology.”^[2] Hortulus 37 offers an interesting test case of this approach. Does it capture Israeli poetry as it is coming into being? Does it reflect an anthologizing impulse? And if so, what are the assumptions behind it?

Jutta Ernst and Oliver Scheiding have recently argued that periodicals should be understood as “participating in relational and dynamic webs – both on a local and translocal level – of socioeconomic conditions, legal and ideological frameworks, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments.”^[3] The case of Hortulus 37 bears this out, as well as other insights from the burgeoning – and increasingly multilingually oriented – field of Periodical Studies. Emphasizing the complexity of the periodical, an “unruly medium” that combines different voices, forms, and genres and has a specific relation to time, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar has argued that “adopting the periodical as an object of study in its own right and embracing the interactions and contradictions among translational and non-translational material can open up a path toward a fuller understanding of the historical context of translation.”^[4] Building on these insights, I read Hortulus 37 as a snapshot of a network that connected German and Hebrew writing in the 1950s, a transnational republic of letters inhabited by German-Jewish writers, albeit one that had only a tenuous and temporary existence. The volume is also a document that illuminates the history of translation between the two languages.^[5] Finally, it contributes to our understanding of the central role of multilingualism and translation in the formation of modern Hebrew literature.^[6]

As Hilty reports, about 70 % of the authors published in Hortulus by the time it reached one thousand subscribers were Swiss. But he also made efforts to broaden the scope of the journal, publishing poets from other parts of the German-speaking world, such as Ingeborg Bachman and Paul Celan.^[7] When Hilty made his journey to Tel Aviv, the journal was increasingly publishing translations as well, and the volume of young poetry from Israel was one of two nationally focused ones – the other featured new poetry from Japan – which Hilty would edit before the journal closed in 1964. Hilty’s Israeli volume contains not only both translated and untranslated material, but also a diversity of forms of translation, including self-translation and collaborative translation. The example I will focus on here – Yehuda Amichai’s German translations of Hebrew poems by Abraham Huss, Dan Pagis, and Natan Zach – complicates our understanding of the distinction between native and non-native languages, as well as the distinction between translation and self-translation.

In her recent study of self-translation in contemporary Latinx poetry, Rachel Galvin has argued that the assumption that “translators are translating to or from a language that is foreign to them and to or from a cultural context to which they do not belong,” is part of the broader cultural denigration of translation as derivative and secondary.^[8] This bias against translation persists despite the growing scholarly consensus, established by scholars such as Lawrence Venutti and Susan Bassnett, who have emphasized the creativity, artfulness, and power of translation. While this assumption is destabilized by the phenomenon of self-translation, Galvin shows that not all forms of self-translation work in the same way. She juxtaposes the contemporary Puerto Rican poets she studies, Raquel Salas Rivera and Urayoán Noel, whose creative, expansive practices of self-translation grow out of the sociolinguistic realities of contemporary US culture and its colonial legacies, with an earlier generation of modernist authors, such as Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, whose self-translations follow immigration, and are understood along the vector of self and other, producing a sense of productive self-estrangement or of language-nostalgia.^[9]

The self-translators and collaborative translators who participated in Hortulus 37 are arguably situated between these two categories: like Nabokov and Beckett, they were twentieth century emigres; and yet, like Salas Rivera and Noel, the complex historical circumstances in which they became Hebrew writers belie a straightforward matrix of self and other, native and foreign. I will further argue that Hortulus 37 requires a rethinking of the cultural impact of translation, which is most often considered through the lens of reception. The influence of Amichai’s translations is evident not so much in German, the target language, but rather in the field of Hebrew literature. This destabilizes the temporal – and hence causal – relations that usually undergird our thinking about translation, in which the source precedes and “causes” the target. Instead, in this case translation has a “boomerang effect,” producing echoes in the source language.

The translations published in Hortulus 37 emerge from postwar networks of cultural transference and exchange whose existence belies common contemporary assumptions – echoed by Hilty himself – about the language ideology and the cultural logic that governed early-statehood Israel, and in particular the relationship of Israelis to Germany. In his introduction to the volume, Hilty invites readers to travel with him, from the cold Swiss winter to the warmth of a November afternoon in Tel Aviv, where he found café tables spread out on the sidewalk and lively conversations taking place. Despite the difference in temperature and in atmosphere, Hilty professes that as a visitor from Switzerland he did find some aspects of Israeli culture familiar. Both are multilingual societies, but unlike Switzerland’s, Hilty swiftly acknowledges, Israel’s multilingualism is transitory, and is bound to give way to the force of the revival of Hebrew. He nevertheless issues a warning to his readers: if we ignore the production of poetry taking place in Israel in languages other than Hebrew, we rob ourselves of its diversity and richness. The volume he introduces to his readers thus includes German translations of Hebrew texts, alongside texts written in German, as well as translations from English, Polish, Yiddish, and French, all under the rubric of Israeli writing.

Two things stand out concerning Hilty’s formulation of this basic premise, that the volume should be a collection of multilingual Israeli poetry, rather than an anthology of Hebrew poetry. Firstly, Hilty’s warning against ignoring the literature written in Israel in languages other than Hebrew may well have been directed not only at his Swiss readers, but also at the various forces shaping Israeli culture at the time. Although anyone living in Israel in the 1950s would have been acutely aware of its multilingualism, Israeli culture and society at the time were shaped by a monolingual ideology, which strongly favored Hebrew over other languages.^[10] Hortulus 37 thus offers not so much a snapshot of a national poetry coming into being, but rather a counterfactual portrait of what Israeli literature could look like under reduced monolingual pressure. Secondly, the list of languages that did make it into the volume is strikingly partial in relation to the multilingual realities of early statehood. Most conspicuously absent are Russian and Arabic. Russian was the first language of many early Zionist pioneers, and it held an important cultural status in the 1950s, especially in the communities of the Kibbutz ha-artzi, which were still aligned with the Soviet Union. Arabic was the language of both the native Palestinian residents of Palestine/Israel and of the Mizrahim, members of the large waves of mass immigration from the Arab world that arrived in the 1950s. In an undated announcement about the upcoming volume to potential readers, Hilty promises that it will include “translations from English, French, Arabic, etc.”^[11] Given what we know of the long and layered history of Israel’s enmity with the Arab world and discrimination faced by Mizrahim in Israel, the fact that Arabic was ultimately excluded from the issue may not require much explanation. However, as Galili Shahar has argued, Arabic is the often silenced third element that must be taken into account in the consideration of the German-Hebrew dialectic.^[12] I shall therefore return to the exclusion of Arabic in the conclusion, in which I think further about the various assumptions Hilty makes about the lives lived between languages by the authors in his volume.

In his introduction, Hilty sets up a contrast between two groups of authors who appear in the volume: those who have assimilated into the presumably monolingual future of Israel and write in Hebrew, and those who are living what he calls an “immigrant existence [Immigrantendasein].” The lives of the members of this second group, as he describes them, are divided between a practical, civic, and professional realm conducted in Hebrew, and the “linguistic region from which they originate [Sprachgebiet aus dem sie stammen]” – and from which their poems articulate an uncertain message, which may or may not be received. In a parenthetical remark Hilty explains: “Obviously, the German-language authors hesitate to seek affiliation [‘Anschluss’] in Germany.”^[13] Though the introduction does not explicitly mention the recent history of Nazi genocide in Europe, Hilty’s maneuver between the terms “deutschsprachig” and “Deutschland” and his use of the loaded term “Anschluss” in this remark are both gestures that allude to that history. Like the exclusion of Arabic, the assumption that the use of the German language was particularly fraught in the years following the end of World War II and the Nazi genocide coheres with commonly held views of what constitutes Israeli and Jewish cultural history at that moment. However, this assumption too will require some reconsideration in light of the actual contents of Hortulus 37. I begin by surveying the table of contents of the journal, returning to the question of in what sense the volume fulfilled Hilty’s ambition to capture poetry as it was coming into being and to what extent it presented itself as an anthology of Israeli literature. I then turn to consider the dynamics of translation in the volume through the example of Yehuda Amichai’s German versions of three Hebrew poems, which I read as cases of collaborative translation which eschew any logic of native and foreign and are akin to Haroldo de Campos conceptualization of translation as transcreation.^[14] Finally, through the example of Ludwig Strauss, I address questions about the Jewish “return” to the German cultural sphere in the aftermath of Nazi genocide, and its relationship to cultural realities of the Middle East, in particular the presence of the Arabic language.

2 Table of Contents

The table of contents of Hortulus 37 diverges from conventional accounts of Israeli literature in the 1950s in several ways, beginning with the prominence of non-Hebrew writing (especially writing in German) and extending to the selection of Hebrew authors. Marking this divergence from the outset, the volume opens with several previously unpublished poems from the archive of Else Lasker-Schüler. A note at the end of the volume specifies that these poems were published with the permission of Manfred Sturmann, the executor of Lasker-Schüler’s estate. This collaboration would continue the following year, when Hilty was the first to publish excerpts from Lasker-Schüler’s unfinished play Ich und Ich (I and I).^[15] Sturmann appears in the volume as an author as well, with an excerpt of his unfinished novel, Lenz fühlt sich verändert (Lenz feels Different), one of two German prose pieces included. The second one is “Die Promenade,” a short prose text by Ludwig Strauss from the volume Fahrt und Erfahrung (Journey and Experience), edited by Werner Kraft and published by Lambert Schneider Verlag in Germany, also in 1959, and to which I shall return.

Lasker-Schüler and Strauss are particularly interesting inclusions in a volume of “new writing from Israel.” Both were German authors with literary careers that predated their arrival in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s, raising questions about their categorization as authors “from Israel.” And neither were living by the time Hortulus 37 was published, making their appearance in a volume of “new writing” somewhat paradoxical. The biographical notes for both authors specify that they had died in Jerusalem, as if to establish their connection to the literary scene represented in the volume and justify their inclusion in it.^[16] The same description – “starb in Jerusalem” – is applied counterfactually to the Hebrew poet David Vogel, who in fact was murdered in Auschwitz. Other German authors who appear in the volume include Werner Kraft and Max Brod (who of course also had a significant literary career that pre-dated his arrival in pre-State Palestine in 1939), both with poems titled “Lied”; Miriam Scheuer with a poem titled “Ikarus” (“Icarus”); and Werner Bukofzer with a poem titled “Wenn die Abende kamen.” (“When the Evenings Came”).^[17]

The majority of the translations in the volume are from Hebrew, but there are also translations from French (poems by Yvette Thomas and Josef Milbauer, both translated by Hans Rudolf Hilty himself); from English (Dennis Silk, translated by Herbert Ernst Stüssi; Margaret Benaya, translated by Werner Bukofzer; and Robert Friend, translated collaboratively by Elizabeth Meierl Perera and Dan Pagis); from Polish (Leo Lipski, translated by Edward J. Cukierman); and from Yiddish (Malka Locker’s self-translation of her poem “Josephus-Lektüre 1942”). The translations from Hebrew include collaborative translations, self-translations, and authors who are listed as both translator and translated. Miriam Scheuer collaborated with Wera Lewin on translations of Leah Goldberg, David Vogel, David Rokeach, and S.Y. Agnon. Yvette Thomas and Hilty co-translated a poem by T. Carmi (Carmi Tscharni).^[18] Hilty and Thomas’s co-translation is the one piece in the volume for which we receive some information about how the translation was carried out: “H.R.H produced the German version on the basis of a French version by Y. Thomas and a verifying conversation with the author.”^[19]

One can only imagine the conversations that took place surrounding other translations as well, for example the collaborative translation of Avraham Huss’s poem “Grüner Kehrreim,” which is signed by Huss himself, alongside Hilty and with Yehuda Amichai. The volume also contains a poem by Amichai – “Palast der Vereinten Nationen in Jerusalem” (“The Palace of the United Nations in Jerusalem”) translated by Rahel Sauer, who was Amichai’s older sister – and two additional translations by him: Natan Zach’s “Sah einen weissen Vogel” (“Saw a White Bird”) and an untitled poem by Dan Pagis.^[20] Like Locker, who self-translated her Yiddish poem for the volume, Tuvia Rübner is listed as the translator both of an excerpt of S. Yishar’s (Yishar Smilansky) novel Die Tage Ziklags and of his own poem “Mein Vater” (“My Father”). Finally, the volume includes one poem by O. Hillel (Hillel Ogen, known in Hebrew as Ayin Hillel), translated by Jonathan Hantke. The volume thus offers a kind of laboratory, in which different modes of translation are juxtaposed, allowing us to think of the continuities and the disruptions that form our understanding of translation, collaborative translation, and self-translation, a matter to which I turn in the next section.

But first it is worthwhile lingering a moment longer with the picture of Hebrew literature in the 1950s that emerges from the selection in this volume. It is marked by some notable absences. There are no poems by Natan Alterman or Abraham Shlonsky, the major voices one might expect to represent the pre-state generation, no representation of the so-called “Canaanite” poets like Yonatan Ratosh, nor any work by important authors from the 1948 generation such as Aharon Megged or Haim Gouri, or younger poets such as Dalia Ravikovitch or David Avidan, to name just a few obvious examples. Of course, from our present vantage point, we have grown weary of anthologies or literary histories that supply only the obvious. Measuring Hilty’s choices against the selections an editor might make retrospectively, with the values of inclusion and gender balance that would motivate them today, opens one line of inquiry, as in my earlier questioning as to why translations from Arabic are not represented in the volume, for example. But it is also productive to consider these choices in relation to what one might expect a contemporary of Hilty’s to include.

One way to do that is to compare Hilty’s volume to an important anthology published in 1965, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, edited by Stanley Burnshaw, T. Carmi, and Ezra Spicehandler.^[21] Of course, the years that separate the two volumes make a difference. Furthermore, unlike Hilty, the editors of this volume did seek to produce an anthology that would provide a comprehensive portrait of Hebrew poetry, starting with the revival movement in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a comparison between the two publications is revealing. The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself includes Yochebed Bat-Miriam, Gabriel Preil, and Abba Kovner, in addition to all the writers I listed above as “obvious” that are missing from Hortulus 37. Absent from the American anthology but included in the Swiss periodical are David Vogel, David Rokeach, and Abraham Huss. Hilty’s volume thus provides a glimpse of an alternative version of the Israeli literary canon. Some aspects of this alternative canon – for example, the inclusion of David Vogel and the central place accorded to Leah Goldberg – are reflective of later reassessments in the field. But it is ultimately useful to remember the warning Hilty issued in his mission statement for Hortulus: that a journal issue is not an anthology, that it aims to capture a cultural reality in flux, as it is coming into being (and possibly out of being).

3 Yehuda Amichai – Translating Birds

A particularly interesting subgroup of writers in the volume were born in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s, arrived in mandatory Palestine as teens, and adopted Hebrew as their primary language. These include Rachel Sauer (born in the south-German city of Würzburg in 1922), who arrived in Palestine with her family in 1935; Yehuda Amichai, Sauer’s famous younger brother (born in 1924); Abraham Huss (also born in 1924, in Lviv/Lemberg), who moved with his family first to Germany and then, in 1933, to Palestine; Tuvia Rübner (born in Bratislava in 1924), educated in German until he escaped alone in 1941; Natan Zach (born in 1930 in Berlin), who settled with his parents in Haifa in 1936; and Dan Pagis (born in 1930 in the Romanian city of Radautz), the only one of the group who spent the war years in Europe, surviving alone as a child and arriving in Palestine at the age of 16, in 1946. In the environment of early Statehood Israel, these authors were differentiated from peers like S. Yizhar and O. Hillel, who were native born (“sabras”) and native speakers of Hebrew (though the distinction is probably not as binary as this description implies; that is, the question is perhaps not so much where a particular writer was born and what language they spoke first, but rather whether and to what extent they were invested in projecting the image of a native-born “sabra”). Yet unlike the older German-language authors in the volume, such as Lasker-Schüler, Brod, and Strauss, these German-speaking members of the generation of the 1920s experienced the rise of Nazism at a formative age, and they were young enough when they arrived in the Hebrew-speaking pre-state Yishuv to adopt the language and make it their own. Also different from older authors who wrote in Hebrew even though it was not their first spoken language, such as Vogel, Agnon, Goldberg, and Strauss, these younger authors turned to Hebrew writing not as an ideological or aesthetic choice, but rather as a necessity of their circumstances.^[22] Their appearance in a volume of German translations thus raises particularly interesting questions about the status of translation and its dynamics, and the role played by native language in translation, questions that come to the fore with special force in the group of poems translated by Amichai into German.^[23] This would not be the last time Amichai produced translations. Later in his career, Amichai translated German poetry – by Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, and Ingeborg Bachmann – into Hebrew. And as Chana Kronfeld has shown, translation and translators became central figures in his own poetry.^[24] But as far as I have been able to ascertain, these are his only translations into German.

The three poems with Amichai as translator were all written by peers from this group: Natan Zach’s “Raiti tsipor levana ba-layla ha-shaḥor,” (“I Saw a White Bird in the Black Night”) published in Zach’s first book, Shirim rishonim (First Poems, 1955); a short untitled poem by Dan Pagis, beginning with the line “Taḥum rakia be-ḥutei matechet,” (“The sky is framed by metal strings”) which appears as the opening poem of the cycle Ir ha-tamid (The Eternal City) in the volume Sheon ha-tsel (The Shadow Clock, 1959); and Abraham Huss’s poem “Pizmon yarok,” (“Green Refrain”) included in his volume Ba-even ha-kasha (In the Hard Stone, 1971).^[25] To understand the significance of these translations, we must consider the shared language and the shared cultural references informing the poets and their translator. Since Amichai was translating Huss, Zach, and Pagis into the language of their early childhoods, these translations occupy a space that is proximate to self-translation. They are best understood as collaborative efforts, and, as I shall show in the case of Natan Zach, can be thought of as significant moments in the literary trajectory of the translated poet, as much as of the translating poet.^[26] The three poems that Amichai translated are very different in style and subject matter, but they share some surprising throughlines.

Huss’s poem, which Amichai, in collaboration with Huss and Hilty, translates as “Grüner Kehrreim” (“Green Refrain”) is a hymn to the cyclicality of nature. The “refrain” designation does not apply to the poem itself, as it is not structured by repetition, but rather to natural phenomena that repeat themselves: new growth after the rain, the changing of seasons, and waves that crash on the shore. This leads, in the penultimate stanza, to the stark realization that “Our sober ruminations cannot escape/the futile conclusion rooted/in the spasm of our imprisoned life.” The stanzas that precede this conclusion, however, speak an exalted language that seems to fly in its face, for example in the lines rendered by the trio of translators as “Brandung, sinnlos peitschend/Riffe des Wesenhaften, muschel-schön,/und Treibsand schichtet sich in Mengen auf,/formt Hügel, Berge.” Here, the senseless repetition of the waves turns into a creative, world-forming force, which creates the “Reef of essence, conch-charming” (in Hebrew, “shuniot ha-yesh ha-metzudafot be-ḥen”). The poem ends with an imperative that bridges the two perspectives, or moods of the poem: exaltation at the wonder of nature and a wistful gesture toward its limits. This final line is also, finally, a refrain of sorts: “Sing your song, sing your song, bird in a net.” In Hebrew, this refrain is animated by the alliteration of the repeated word “shir,” echoed in the final word of the poem, “reshet” (“shiri shirekh, shiri shirekh, tzipor ba-reshet”). The German version of the line reads: “Sing, sing Dein Lied, sing Dein Lied, Vogel im Netz.” To bring his philosophical rumination to a close, Huss resorts to a common poetic trope, in which the poet is mirrored by a singing bird whose sounds evoke the limits of human language. The trope itself becomes a net that captures the avian-song of his poem in a familiar refrain, asking the reader to consider whether poetry can only repeat itself, like the waves, or whether it might possess a wondrous, world-making force.

The figure of a captive bird (or, in this case, captive birds, plural) reappears in Pagis’s poem, the first line of which is translated by Amichai as “Der Himmel ist durch Drähte abgeschlossen” (“The sky is divided by wires”) In contrast with the natural world depicted in Huss’s poem, which recursively blooms and comes into being, leaving the speaker in a paradoxical state of weary wonder, the world depicted in Pagis’s poem is limited at the outset. The sky is divided by wires into “mishbetzot ha-paḥad” (“squares of fear) – translated by Amichai as “Angstquadrate” – and the only thing exceeding these borders is their royal red mantel of rust. The second and third lines of the short poem describe a good-natured death that strews birds inside these “fear-quadrants.” Unlike Huss’s captive bird, euphonically exhorted to sing, Pagis’s birds are silent. The poet is mirrored in this poem not in feathered singing, but rather in the figure of death, who fills the air with birds much like a poet fills the page with words. In its style and diction, Pagis’s six-line, rhymed poem recalls the medieval Hebrew poetry that he was studying during these years, and which would become his area of specialization as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For example, the words “me’il” and “tashbetz” (“coat” and “pattern”) appear in proximity, echoing Moshe Ibn-Ezra’s famous nature poem “Ketonet passim” (“Multicolored Garment”) which includes these words in a description of the colorful coat of a garden. The allusion to the medieval poetic genre, which traditionally exalts nature, lends irony to Pagis’s bleak vision of a modern world in which nature has been tamed. Amichai’s German translation seems to allude to a different poetic tradition. It constructs a series of constative statements that evokes the expressionist idiom of Jakob van Hoddis’s famous poem “Weltende” (“World-end”) situating Pagis’s poem in a tradition of crisis-diagnosing modernist poetry. Pagis’s poem and Amichai’s translation evoke different intertexts, situating the poem not only in different languages but also in different traditions.

The birds continue to wander through Amichai’s Hortulus translations, appearing as the central figure in Zach’s poem.^[27] In Lisa Katz’s English translation, Zach’s poem reads:

I saw a white bird in the black of night

and I knew that soon the light would dim

my eye in the black of night.

I saw a cloud like the palm of a hand

and I knew that the rain I sensed

I could not tell yet to any man.

I saw a leaf that fell, while falling.

Time is short. I’m not complaining.^[28]

Amichai’s German title truncates Zach’s “Raiti tzipor levana ba-laila ha-shaḥor” into “Sah einen weissen Vogel” (turning “I saw a white bird in the black of night” into “Saw a white bird”). Elsewhere, as we shall see, Amichai’s translation expands, rather than condenses, Zach’s poem. I argue that the translation balances between inflation and deflation (to use a pair of metaphors sometimes applied to translation) to engage with and comment on the poem. A few years after the publication of Amichai’s German version of this poem in 1959, Zach wrote another poem about a bird, which can be read as a response to the experience of being translated by his peer.

Dan Miron describes “Raiti tsipor levana ba-laila ha-shaḥor” as paradigmatic of an epistemological exploration carried out in Zach’s early poetry, which leads to an “anti-prophetic” mode. Miron notes that the poem was close to Zach’s heart, and he chose it for other anthologies in addition to Hilty’s. It became the first link in a chain of at least eight poems written throughout his career that all include the phrase “raiti tzipor” (I saw a bird).^[29] Like other early poems by Zach, “I Saw a White Bird in the Black Night” uses the rhetorical and epistemological framework of biblical and classical prophecy. This framework is based on a fundamental connection between the verbs “see” and “know,” with a prophet defined as the person who can see signs and convert them to knowledge. The prophet Tiresias, for example, sees birds and can read their signs as an augur of the future of the royal house of Thebes.

Following the modernist tradition of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Elliot, Miron contends that Zach uses the veneer of prophecy, but he faces only one certainty – absence.^[30] Thus, in the first stanza of this early poem, a symbolically freighted white bird appears in the black night, and the speaker, in response, expresses his awareness of the certainty of death. However, the absence of a clear causal relationship between the image of the bird and the knowledge of death destabilizes the prophetic force of the sight of the bird. The second stanza of the poem revolves around an allusion to Kings 1, chapter 18, which relates the story of Elijah’s prophecy of rain. The biblical story follows (or, perhaps, helps to establish) the prophetic paradigm: Elijah the prophet (or in this case, his representative, a young boy) sees a small cloud, the size of the palm of a man’s hand, and can interpret this sign correctly to mean that rain is coming. Zach’s speaker sees the same sign but rather than sending messengers to King Ahab, as Elijah had in the biblical story, he turns inward and questions the ability of words to truly impart the experience of rain. In its brief final stanza, the poem returns to the fundamental insight that time – and life – is short. The poem ends on a note of reconciliation, with the speaker declining to complain about this fact.

What happens to this epistemological investigation when Amichai translates the poem from Hebrew to German? One might expect the doubt to be compounded by another layer of uncertainty, as every choice faced by the translator is a crossroad of potential indecision. But the translation could also provide a new reference point for the questions being asked in the poem, and thus a new opening to knowledge and insight. In other words, perhaps Amichai’s translation contributed to the process that Miron describes as a transition from the black-grey-white world of Zach’s early poetry to the bright multicolor world of the collection he published in 1966, Kol ha-ḥalav ve-ha-dvash (All of the Milk and Honey). In this later collection, Zach reuses the expression “raiti tsipor” for the first time, a poetic gesture that I read as a response to Amichai’s translation.

Amichai structures his German version of the poem as variation of Zach’s structure, in which all the lines in each stanza are rhymed and the rhythm is almost metrical, producing the somewhat looser:

Sah einen weissen Vogel

Sah einen weissen Vogel in dunkler Nacht.

Da wusst’ ich, dass es Zeit war, das Licht zu löschen,

das Licht meiner Augen in dunkler Nacht.

Sah eine Wolke, nicht grösser als eine Hand.

Da wusst’ ich: Den Regen, wie ich ihn verstand,

kann ich keinem erklären.

Sah ein Blatt, das fiel, das fällt.

Die Zeit ist kurz.

Beschwer mich nicht über die Welt.

In the first stanza, Zach ends two lines with the word “shaḥor” (black), and Amichai does the same with “Nacht” (night). In the second stanza, Zach repeats the same pattern, rhyming “ish” with “ish” (for “man”), whereas Amichai rhymes “Hand” (referring to a man’s hand, the measure of the size of the cloud in the allusion to Kings) with “verstand” (the past tense of the verb “understand”). Finally, in the third stanza, Amichai inflates Zach’s poem with an additional rhyme, and with it an explication of Zach’s “I do not complain.” In Amichai’s version, the speaker does not direct his complaint at the world, but rather delivers the line “I do not complain about the world” (“Beschwer mich nicht über die Welt”) which rhymes with the opening line of the stanza: “sah ein Blatt, das fiel, das fällt.” This is one of several translation choices made by Amichai that ground the poem in a reassuring reality, cutting against the modernist doubt that dominates Zach’s original poem.

Zach opens the poem with a description of the speaker’s encounter with the white bird in the black night, a fleeting miraculous vision tempered by the knowledge that “the light of my eyes will soon extinguish.” Amichai eschews the Hebrew inchoative used by Zach to describe the coming extinguishing of the light, which emphasizes the parallel between the darkness of the night, the sleep it brings, and inevitably approaching death, replacing it with a transitive verb that imbues the speaker with agency. In Amichai’s rendition, the scene is transformed into an innocent childhood memory. “Sah einen weissen Vogel in dunkler Nacht./Da wusst’ ich, dass es Zeit war, das Licht zu löschen,/das Licht meiner Augen in dunkler Nacht” (I saw a white bird in the dark night./Then I knew, that is was time to turn off the light/the light of my eyes in the dark night). Despite the dramatic sight of a white bird in the black night, the time has now come to turn off the light and go to sleep. This too – like the addition of “über die Welt” (“of the world”) at the end of the poem – is an inflation of the original, adding the sense that the extinguishing of the light is reassuring in that it follows a preordained ordering of the day.

However, if we return to the notion of translation as a trans-creative activity, we might think of both of these translation choices as “deflationary,” insofar as they temper the pathos of negative prophecy that infuses Zach’s original, reminding the poet that while time is short, the world also offers a sense of permanence, and a final landing spot for the poem. Instead of a meditation on death, Amichai produces a reassuring picture of nocturnal rest. A similar gesture may be discerned in Amichai’s choice, in the second stanza, to translate Zach’s “ha-geshem she-ani margish” (the rain that I feel) as “Der Regen, wie ich ihn verstand” (the rain, as I understood it). Zach’s speaker is jailed (perhaps like the caged birds in the poems by Huss and Pagis) in a solipsistic world: he feels the rain, but this is a lonely experience that cannot be shared, cannot be told to anyone. Rhyming “verstand” with “Hand,” Amichai sets up the speaker’s relationship with the rain as one of intellectual understanding, rather than feeling, and switches Zach’s past tense with present. This speaker falters not in the act of telling, but rather in the act of explaining, which is still ongoing: “Den Regen, wie ich ihn verstand,/kann ich keinem erklären” (The rain, as I understand it/I cannot explain to anyone). In other words, instead of solipsism, his version of the poem offers a ground for negotiation: even if it is impossible to explain the rain, the poet, by writing this poem, continues to try.

Indeed, we might consider the translation itself as a ground for negotiation, an attempt to reach a shared understanding of the world by revising the original poem. Zach responds to this negotiation in his famous follow-up to “Raiti tzipor levana ba-laila ha-shaḥor”: a poem that begins with the same pair of words and is titled “Tzipor shhniya” (Second Bird):

I saw a bird of exquisite beauty.

The bird saw me.

A bird of such exquisite beauty I’d never see again

until the day I die.

Then I shivered in the sun.

I uttered words of peace.

The words I uttered yesterday

I won’t repeat today.^[31]

Clearly alluding to the earlier poem, Zach’s revision of the ornithological encounter depicts a reciprocal relationship, in which he sees the bird and the bird looks back at him, an exalting aesthetic experience described by the speaker as unrepeatable. I propose reading the reciprocity of this encounter with the bird as, in the first instance, a depiction of the experience of being translated and having the bird in your poem look back at you in a transformed version. Marked by this experience, Zach can now replace the black night of his earlier poem with a quiver or a tremor of sunlight (“retet shel shemesh”) that leads him to “words of peace.” And instead of lingering with the panic of time running out and words being insufficient to express the unsayable, Zach now ends the poem by describing language and poetry as transitory and always subject to evolution and change: “The words I uttered yesterday/I will not repeat today” (in Lisa Katz’s English translation). These final lines can be read as an ironic form of apophasis, since the poem begins with a literal repetition of the words that Zach had used in the beginning of an earlier poem (and indeed, would repeat many times over the course of his career). Put differently, the words he has uttered yesterday are the words he says today. Alternatively, they can be read as the profession of a new-found faith in the power of poetry: although he uses the same lexical items to produce the phrase “raiti tsipor,” the import has been transformed by the context of their utterance. That is to say: the words he has uttered yesterday are no longer the same when he says them today. Furthermore, if we understand the phrase as a response to Amichai’s German translation of Zach’s earlier poem, these final lines might also be read as an allusion to their shared experience of linguistic transformation: the German words said in the past are not the ones used today.

This reading of the translation encounter between Zach and Amichai reorients our understanding of the entire volume, and with it our sense of how periodicals can illuminate the dynamics of translation, to return to Gürçağlar’s assertion. Rather than merely tracing how periodicals frame translated materials for a local reading audience, the case of Hortulus 37 enables us to ask how the work of curating and translating impacts authors and translators, and what kinds of conversations it spurs in the translated culture. Amichai, Huss, Pagis, and Zach, all participate in a conversation in which the lines between poetry, translation, and self-translation are blurred, reflecting the complex linguistic realities of their generation. In the case of the transition from Zach’s “I Saw a Bird” to his “Second Bird” via Amichai’s translation, we can trace the trans-creative force of translation, which appears here not as a handmaiden or a mere tool or medium, but rather as an element that inserts itself into poetic creation.

4 Ludwig Strauss’s Returns and Worlds

By way of conclusion, I return briefly to Hilty’s statement, in the introduction to the volume, that “obviously, the German-language authors hesitate to seek recognition/readoption [‘Anschluss’] in Germany.” As I noted, Hilty equivocates in this context between referring to the German Sprachraum (to which his own journal belongs) and to German-language authors, on the one hand, and using the designation Deutschland to refer to Germany itself, on the other hand. When he wrote the introduction, there were of course two different states that called themselves Germany, on two sides of the iron curtain, as well as a broader German-speaking sphere that included Austria and Switzerland. One can only assume that he meant all of them. And while it is hard to determine exactly what Hilty imagined as the undesired literary “Anschluss” in Germany, there is ample evidence that German-Jewish authors who became members of the Israeli cultural sphere sought and found many routes and modes of return.^[32] Ludwig Strauss, one of the authors featured in Hortulus 37, is a fascinating case in point. A full account of Strauss’s postwar German publications is beyond the scope of this essay. In the years immediately following the end of the war, he was in contact with journal editors across German speaking Europe, and his poetry and translations were published in a diverse range of periodicals, including Sinn und Form in East Berlin, Die Gegenwart in Freiburg im Breisgau, and Lynkeus and Silberboot in Vienna. Among these publications are texts that we might designate as self-translations (for example the German version of Strauss’s poem “Hymn to Asia” first printed in the Hebrew newspaper Al-hamishmar, which was then published in Sinn und Form) and as collaborative translations (Strauss’s German translations of Leah Goldberg’s poetry, which are discussed extensively in the correspondence between the two). In other words, considering Strauss’s post-war German publications will extend our thinking about both topics at the center of this article: periodicals as vehicles of cross-cultural exchange and translation, and the slippery borders between self-translation and collaborative translation.

In lieu of a full consideration, I end by looking at Strauss’s brief prose piece in Hortulus 37, “Die Promenade,” an impressionist account of a walk on a Mediterranean boardwalk, presumably located in one of Palestine’s port cities, Jaffa or Haifa. I use the term Palestine, because although the text was published in Hortulus and, concurrently, in the book Fahrt und Erfahrungen, which both appeared in 1959, it clearly harks back to a pre-state space inhabited by a diverse assortment of characters, including a Black African, an Arab woman, foreign soldiers, Zionist pioneers, and a Bedouin. Strauss’s orientalist description of the diverse crowd, delivered from the point of view of a European visitor who can distinguish “people [ …]of real European elegance, and [ …] those of garishly imitated, Levantine [elegance], and [ …] those who are beautiful, without needing to know about elegance,” mirrors Hilty’s own account of his arrival in Café Kassit as a visitor from abroad, who can find the literary gems worthy of inclusion in his anthology.

Despite the promises made in Hilty’s promotional material, that the volume would include translations from Arabic, Strauss’s figures on the boardwalk, who remain voiceless and nameless, are the only representatives of the language. The volume thus demonstrates Galili Shahar’s contention, cited above, that the Arab most often remains the silenced third in the German-Hebrew dialectic.^[33] Short of commenting explicitly on this dynamic, Strauss’s text takes a turn from the dispassionate observation of all the national, ethnic, and racial types encountered on the boardwalk, to a reflection on human diversity as such, when the speaker asks himself how he can look at all these different people beyond their differences:

As many as they are, they do not lose themselves in each other like the waves, they exist in themselves and tear you apart in their diversity […] Suddenly you no longer see the one space, in which they all flow together and past one another, but you know … that each one carries his own space with him, that each one is the center, around which the whole fullness of the world, as they understand and experience it, is organized.^[34]

With these comments, Strauss brings us back to one of the broad questions with which I opened this discussion, namely how to understand the periodical as a vehicle of crosslinguistic and cross-cultural transference, without falling into the homogenizing vision of an enlightenment concept of world literature. His vision of the multiple worlds inhabiting the Palestine boardwalk is perhaps a better point of departure for thinking about the modes of exchange and translation that form Hortulus 37 and the cultural world from which it emerged.

5 Conclusions

Hortulus 37 opens a window into various forms: trans- and re-creation, including self-translation, collaborative translations, and translations that travel along routes between first and second languages that are anything but straightforward. Amichai’s translation of Zach’s bird poem, and Zach’s response with a second bird poem, shows the impact of translation that extends beyond the realm of reception in the target language. Strauss’s contribution to the volume helps us think about the broader cultural context within which the volume comes into being, including the place of Arabic in the German-Hebrew dialectic. Strauss’s vision of a “world of worlds” reframes the discussion of Hortulus 37 as a product of an uneven cultural geography that spans German speaking Europe and Palestine/Israel, and is marked by multiple histories of expulsion, immigration, and exile, and the linguistic dynamics that attend them.