From Thirty Pages
By Avot Yeshurun, translated by Dan Alter
1.
A day will come no-one reads my mother's letters.
A pile I have of them.
Not from a her
No word.
A day will come no-one will take them in hand.
Of them a bundle, undone.
They'll say: paper slip
No more.
On that day I'll take them to Bar Kokhba's cave
& send them up in dust. The world of before
Will not study it for
A mother tongue.
This correspondence from Bar Kokhba was discovered in the "Cave of Letters" in the Judean desert. Bar Kokhba led a major Judean rebellion against the Roman Empire in the 2nd Century C.E.
2.
My mother's letters I buried in my table's graveyard.
I sat down at the table to sing.
The poor broke sheep
Is a rich thing.
You have enough of them to stuff a whole road.
Sit on your bottom like a jug.
Your mouth will boil with water,
You're scared to gulp.
But you're such lonely not lonely, such full of happiness,
Push into a pocket your verse.
The letters-mother is happy:
Writers letters.
5.
Myself I sought to forget my mother's letters.
Even made my table clean.
They continue sending,
Touching me.
You cleared the desk of your confused papers,
Shut one by one in a file
Letters even the stamps;
Us at the side.
Read or don't read. He acts like as if...
As if your sorting files today
Gives reason to read even
Letters of the dead.
7.
I got your letter, it said answer answer.
Until in his might the mail-bearer--
Dew comes & blurs.
Answer answer.
I answered by letter, it said even sweeter
Are the acacia and shamouti trees.
I would injure.
Answer answer.
At home I have no good word.
No sign of me in your letter.
As for now the sun's under.
Answer answer.
“Shamouti" is the Arabic word for Jaffa orange trees
About the authors:
Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992) was an acclaimed modern Hebrew poet. His work is less widely known outside of Israel than his contemporaries in part because it is difficult to translate: his poems employ multilingual strategies such as incorporating words from Yiddish, Arabic and other languages, as well as a Yiddish-inflected diction. His inclusion of Arabic in his poems was part his ongoing critique of the marginalization of Arabs and Arabic in Israeli culture. Yeshurun's whole family and all the residents of his home village in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust, and many of his poems struggle with this legacy, including the series from which I’ve selected these poems. Winner of the Israel Prize for literature in 1992.
Dan Alter’s poems and translations have been published widely; his first collection “My Little Book of Exiles” won the Poetry Prize for the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Awards. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician.
