Why Don’t You Write in Hebrew?
Poem
Aviya Kushner
Because I’m afraid of you, Isaiah,
afraid I’ll hear the six wings:
Two to cover the face
and two to cover the legs
and two to fly—
And I ask how can I praise
wings that cover feet and face?
And how can I curse
when you have already cursed with your carcasses
of sleazy financiers,
with your ugly and public deaths for those who squeeze
the poor, the widowed, the temporarily weak?
You ask me to compete
head-on with you, and I can’t because I cannot hear
in your presence.
You thunder so, in the space inside my left ear,
that I cannot forget you,
even for the length of a line, the weight of a tear.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, School of Rembrandt
Author’s Note
One question has been foremost in my mind, for decades: which language to write in? I grew up speaking Hebrew, and for years I wrote poetry in both Hebrew and English. I found myself asking how anyone could possibly write poetry in Hebrew when the prophet Isaiah had already existed. Who could possibly compete with nachamu nachamu ami (“Comfort, comfort my people”), the opening of Isaiah 40?
Wolf Lamb Bomb, the collection from which this poem is taken, represents the culmination of twenty years of thinking about the Book of Isaiah, of listening to it read out loud in synagogue and at the family dining room table, and of rereading it in Hebrew and in English. It is my record of talking back to Isaiah. To me, Isaiah is first and foremost a great poet—and my all-time favorite poet at that. He often uses questions as a poetic device, and that invited me to ask him questions. Sometimes, I imagined the questions Isaiah would ask in response to my questions; that can be heard here.
I never felt that “anxiety of influence” in English, but English presented its own problems—the words of the Tanach sounded weird in it. I struggled to find a way forward, in any language, until my teacher, the poet Robert Pinsky, told me that I could put Hebrew into English, and in so doing, expand English. That advice lived in my mind, no matter where I physically lived.
During the Second Intifada, when I was living in Jerusalem, I turned to the words of Isaiah. I did the same in New York, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and after visiting my grandfather’s childhood home in Germany. I kept reading Isaiah through all the years of slowly becoming a writer. I realized that there is a reason Isaiah is read in a cycle in synagogues each summer. It is a cycle of comfort—but also a cycle of acknowledging pain.
Isaiah is very comfortable with anger; you might say he makes anger beautiful. I often find myself thinking about who has the right to be angry in our society, and who has the right to tell the truth about pain. Over time, I realized that prophetic anger, in all its beauty, represents a comfort with power—and poetic power. This poem grapples with that realization and that responsibility.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
Aviya Kushner, associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, is The Forward’s language columnist. She is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (2015), which Robert Pinsky called “a passionate, illuminating essay about meaning itself.” Her debut poetry collection, Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books), was published in June 2021.
