Marcela Sulak
The Poem
Like a shell
washed on the beach,
nothing’s in it to hint what occurs
in the depths,
but once in a while
someone will bend to lift it from grains
of sand, and when they take it in their hands
their eyes will deepen; a mute thought
will flutter a moment,
slip
through all the fishermen’s nets.
I love Eli Eliahu’s poetry for its profound simplicity, its musicality, and for the way Biblical stories keep repeating in it. Eliahu began writing poetry in earnest after the death of his father, whom Eliahu remembers as a wonderful storyteller, and for whom the Bible was an exciting treasury of stories.
The Bible is not a political tool in Eliahu’s poetry, nor is it an object of reverence, since Eliahu is secular. But Eliahu’s work does portray prophets as poets, and Babylon the home of poetry. I can’t help noting that Babylon is also the birthplace of the Talmud and home to several Biblical prophets. Ancient Babylon is in modern-day Iraq, which is the birthplace of Eliahu’s parents. Perhaps Eliahu is symbolically overthrowing the cultural dominance of Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of European descent) in Israel society.
Eliahu’s simple but condensed lines recall prophecies or parables. Like prophecies and parables, Eliahu’s poems invite a believer to transform his or her life by transforming his or her understanding. Also, in his poems, one must first solve a riddle before one receives instructions. I love this approach, which ensures the reader is involved, a co-creator. As a translator, I valued the compactness of a riddle, parable, or prophecy.
I’d translated all three of Eliahu’s books, I and Not an Angel (2008), City and Fears (2011), and Epistles to the Children (2018), then selected the ones I judged most powerful and lovely, the ones that fit into my “poet as prophet” frame.
Initially I was not inclined to include “The Poem” in my selection because the romantic image of the lone male wandering through nature, or walking along the beach, thinking deep thoughts, is rather wearisome, even if he is a prophet. But English verbs are not marked by gender as Hebrew verbs are, so the speaker’s gender would be ambiguous in English. On closer inspection, given the context of Eliahu’s prophet figures in his collections, I began to see a resonance between the fishermen’s nets of this poem and the trope of Jesus and his disciples as fishers of men. This poem playfully focuses on the fish that gets away, remaining unaffiliated, free. The ideas hidden in a poem, the poem suggests, belong to no one and everyone; they are not owned by religion or politics.
When Eliahu won Israel’s prestigious Brenner prize for poetry in Sept. 2019, the musicality of “The Poem” was noted in the judges’ comments. My first translation decisions were focused on how to keep the musicality, which is enhanced by the poem’s compactness. You can see how short the Hebrew lines are—only eleven words in the entire first stanza. The shortest way to do this in English is
Like a shell
washed on the beach
that only suggests
what occurs in the depths,
This creates lovely sounds: the echo of the “e” in “suggests” and “depths,” the “ch” of “beach” that mutates into the soft “g” sound of “suggests.” In this version the first line of this stanza begins with three syllables, and each line increases the syllable count by one, building up a tension, like a wave, preparing to crash on the shore.
One issue with this first translation attempt is that the first stanza becomes a fragment in English. In Hebrew there is no present tense verb to be—that verb is implied, so in Hebrew, it is technically not a fragment, but an independent clause. Could the title be the beginning of the first line? Then the sentence should read “the poem [is] like a shell.” But no, upon consulting with Eliahu, I learned this was not the case. In fact, were it the case, the poem’s possibilities would be reduced, for the entire poem would simply be a simile for the poem as an object, and then the poem would unfold explaining the simile, and we as readers would be deprived of joy of discovering for ourselves what the implied subject of the sentence was.
I ended up translating the first stanza like this:
Like a shell
washed on the beach,
nothing’s in it to hint what occurs
in the depths,
Now the rhymes have become internal, rather than end rhymes, as in the first version. “In it” and “hint ” are near rhymes. There is consonance in “hint” and “what.” The “th” in “nothing” and “depths” envelope the internal rhymes and create a relationship between them, suggesting the likeness of “nothing” and “depths.” This internal rhyming, and the hints of assonance and consonance, perform the content of the poem, for the rhyme is hidden within the line like the depths are hidden in the poem.
This is a literal translation that keeps the independent clause intact, but the first stanza’s word count is increased in English. This is not unusual—an English translation is typically 25% longer than a Hebrew original, simply because in Hebrew, indefinite articles and various prepositional phrases can be attached to verbs or nouns. Nevertheless, the first stanza of this poem contains eleven words in Hebrew and eighteen in English, more than 25% as many words. In the visual poem, this is noticeable. But music does not reside in the visual. Saying the poem aloud in Hebrew and English, the difference in line length is nonexistent; both versions contain 21 syllables.
Stanza two is more expansive in length and thought, so I fretted less about line length. My English translation is as follows:
but once in a while
someone will bend to lift it from grains
of sand, and when they take it in their hands
their eyes will deepen; a mute thought
will flutter a moment,
slip
“The eyes deepen,” though a literal translation, is strange in English. I toyed with using “eyes widen,” but the phrase is also strange in the original Hebrew, and when eyes “deepen,” it suggests they are the sea (a pun that works in English, but not in Hebrew).
Photo credit: Moti Kikayon
This second stanza is in future tense, which means that, in English, we must add the verb “will,” which lengthens the line. At first I don’t notice the issue, because the sentence “When they take it in their hands,” implies the future tense—we don’t need to say, “when they will take it in their hands.” One eloquent solution to trimming the English would be to keep the second stanza in the present tense. But all of stanza two is an imagined scenario, infused with hope, so I was inclined to keep the future tense, which is more open, and less fated, than the present tense.
To balance out line length and syllable count, I decided to eliminate other words, like the “the” before “grains of sand”; since grains is in the plural, we are pretty secure in our knowledge of which grains of sand to which the sentence refers. In Hebrew, the word “and” is always attached to the noun in Hebrew, and not a word by itself; it is sometimes used as a comma. I eliminated it in most of the stanza, but I kept the “and” in line 7, so that “hand,” “and,” and “sand” create waves of sound to mimic the waves of the sea.
My final question was, what does the “mute thought” of line 8 do in this particular poem? In Hebrew it will “escape/from all the nets,” which is only two words in Hebrew, but four in English. To pare down, I decided omit a syllable or two. “Escape” implies that the thought was first caught up in a net, so “evade” (which, unlike the verb “escape,” does not require the preposition “from”) would not be quite accurate. A fish evades a net without ever having been caught up in one.
The formal elements heighten the poem’s emotional power. This, and his other poems, create a terrifying and delicious feeling of capture and release, of having narrowly escaped disaster; sometimes having been wounded by the encounter. This feeling is also prevalent in the stories of the prophets from which Eliahu’s poems draw. Jonah, for example, saves a ship from a storm at sea by identifying himself as the one who has caused God’s wrath (and solving a riddle on the ship). He flees the storm only to be swallowed by a whale. He escapes the belly of the whale. The feeling of narrowly escaping disaster is so prevalent in Jewish history, that we joke that Jewish holidays of Purim, Passover, and Hanukkah can be summed up in a sentence: they tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.
In my translation, I chose “slip,” which requires a preposition, but the verb itself is only one syllable (unlike “evade” which is two syllables). To “slip through” a net means that you experience the tension of having been caught, and the relief of the escape.
“Slip” also, and with chutzpah, repeats the short i sound of the future tense English verb “will” in the line above. While this is incredibly minor, and possibly unnoticeable to anyone else, it gave me great pleasure. In slipping from all the fisherman’s nets, I, the translator, have escaped the syllabic constrictions of the stanza’s net. I took pleasure in highlighting what some translators might feel is the double sin of introducing more words/syllables into this sparse poem, and then emphasizing their introduction with assonance. Thus, the poem is already working as the speaker envisions in the beginning of the poem—a reader has picked up the poem/shell and has translated it into another hand, giving the mute thought an additional voice and potential context in a new language.
Writing Prompt
Choose a poem that you initially resist for aesthetic reasons. Locate the point(s) of your resistance in the poem.
- For translators: When you begin to translate, lavish this point/these points with all of your concentration and skill; render them as precisely as you can, attending to sound, syllable count, and rhythm, until you have escaped into a new understanding. This translation is an example.
- For poets: Look at what you resist in the poem–an image that seems tired, an ending that tidies up too neatly, a jarring rhythm—and write a poem to that, treating it as if it were a person, an animal, a city, or a household object that is dear to you.
Three examples of such poems are, “I’m Over the Moon” by Brenda Shaughnessy, “For Years I Have Been Prohibited From Mentioning the Moon” by Khaled Mattawa, and “Cabbage, a Love Song” by Marcela Sulak.
Photo credits: Poetry International and Haaretz.
Eli Eliahu and Marcela Sulak
Eli Eliahu’s publications include Epistles to the Children (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2018); Ir veh-beh-helot [City and fears] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2011), and Ani veh lo malakh [I, and not an angel] (Tel Aviv: Helicon, 2008). He’s received the Matanel Prize for Young Jewish Writers (2013), the Israel Prime Minister’s Prize in Poetry (2014), and the Brenner Prize for Poetry (2019). He works as an editor at the daily Ha-aretz.
Marcela Sulak’s translations from the Czech include Karel Hynek Macha’s May and K. J. Erben’s A Bouquet of Czech Folktales; and from the Hebrew, Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, which was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry Translation. For her current work on Sharron Hass, Sulak received a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. From the French, she has translated Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha’s Bela-Wenda: Voices from the Heart of Africa. Sulak has published four collections of poetry and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2016). Sulak is an Associate Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.