Among the great longer poems of the twentieth century, the circumstances under which Shaul Tchernikhovsky’s To the Sun was composed were perhaps the most unlikely. This sonnet cycle was written in Hebrew in war-torn Odessa in 1919, with Red and White forces struggling for control of the city. Tchernikhovsky, then forty-five, had served on the front lines as a doctor in the Russian army, an experience directly reflected in the seventh sonnet of the cycle. He grew up in a modest- sized town on the Ukrainian steppes, and Russian, not Yiddish, was his first language. The experience of being nurtured there through an intimate bond with nature is explicitly recalled in the first three sonnets of the cycle, as is his feeling of being torn away from that cherished bucolic realm when he came to Odessa while still in his teens. After his army service, working part time as a doctor in Odessa, he was earning barely enough to support himself, his Russian wife, and their young daughter, and food in any case was in scarce supply. In the midst of all this turmoil, Tchernikhovsky chose to compose a hugely ambitious synoptic poem that would tell the story of his calling as a poet, express his passionate credo as a vitalist and a pantheist, articulate a vision of the role of art and also science in human culture, and confront the challenge to that vision posed by violence in history. He did all this, moreover, in Hebrew, a language that was just beginning to be revived as a spoken tongue. The poetic form that he embraced was the sonnet corona, an especially intricate one originating in the Italian Renaissance. It consists of a sequence of fifteen Petrarchan sonnets, with the requisite rhyming octaves and sestets, in which the last line of each sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next sonnet, with the concluding sonnet composed of all fourteen of the first lines in the order in which they first appeared. Tchernikhovsky’s choice of this difficult form is in itself an expression of his deep commitment, even under great stress, to the tradition of humanism, the formal perfection of the corona being a kind of homage to his Italian precursors and a bulwark against the chaos swirling around him in the Russia of 1919. To the Sun is a work of stunning technical virtuosity. Unlike many of the Hebrew poets of his time, Tchernikhovsky had no traditional religious education, and the neo-pagan worldview that To the Sun articulates, conjuring up a fusion of fire and blood in all things, feels authentic to the poet. This translation makes no attempt to emulate the rhyme scheme, for it is hard to see how that could be done without transmogrifying and distorting the meanings of the Hebrew. A compensatory effort has been made to give a certain rhythmic integrity to as many of the lines as possible. Tchernikhovsky’s Hebrew is difficult, often deliberately swerving from the ways in which the language was used by other Hebrew poets of his era. At some points in the cycle, the exigencies of rhyme and meter produce lines that are crabbed and somewhat obscure in the original, and these have not been smoothed out in the transla- tion. But whatever the limitations of this English version, it is offered in the hope that it will make visible to English readers a grand poetic edifice that combines humanistic values with a vivid sense of the world’s pulsating, eternally sustaining life. ROBERT ALTER Our ancestors who were in this place, their backs to God’s temple and their faces to the east, would bow eastward to the sun. BABYLONIAN TALMUD, TRACTATE SUKKAH 1. I was to my god like a hyacinth or mallow That has naught in its world but its pure beaming sun, And an angel came knocking: “Rise, grow, blossom’s scion, burst forth In your song, festive song, in sharp thorns.” I sucked the juice of the furrow. Like wine the scent whelmed me Of the crop-yielding soil with its clods, its soft clods. Lacked he prelate and priest in the great city’s temple That he led me on here, set me out as his prophet? Is the sap on cypress-silver any less in my eyes Than your good olive oil glowing gold on the head, And the fragrance of pear-tree in the field that I tended Than Sabean merchants’ powders, than my nard and my incense? And I bowed to you secretly, bent low in reverence. Like one stalk of gold grain in stalks heavy with yield. 2. Like one stalk of gold grain in fields heavy with yield That sprang up in great beauty and flourished in vigor, Like this stalk of grain hiding within it its secret, Life’s pledge everlasting and relic of old. Like stalk of grain furrow-stolen that suckles the earth And moist with live nectar it dreams of its glory, I, too, did burgeon! But my soul ever thirsted. Ah, day chases day! Shall I call in the writ? My dream yet unrealized, my path still hidden. When on all sides I am fearful: what for me, who for me… Have I come to the border? Have I already crossed it? Did my father deceive me and not keep his word? A wildflower am I, and my sun is my father. He sent me warm rains and decreed mountain mists. 3. He sent me warm rains and decreed mountain mists, And the twilight of sea-depths, abode of great silence, A dense cloud of fire burning hot in its casement, And until it bursts upward, earth’s breadth but confines it; The sundial too confining to take in the limit, The sun with the clamor of ocean fire on it, And words from old times passed by father to father, Raptures of great city’s sick, lore of guileless peasants, For me to be the axis of the world that he fashioned, Its essence, true center, he
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