Content warning: death, war, the Holocaust, and suicide.

Abraham Sutzkever and Poetry

Make song from down under, make song from the swamps… נידער דער פֿון זינג און ,זומפּן די פֿון זינג און

On the run from the ghetto in the bogs
you’d almost think this Jew was the last one
real poet in Europe, singing now for dogs
and corpses of his mother and his son.

Under bronze sunlight, in a chimney’s pass,
primeval logic sang him, like the note
of shattered moon reflected in the glass
with which he finally did not slit his throat.

I see him gasp in the gruff liberty
of a storm beating him from chains to life
unblinking through the glades of poetry
and through the forest starving with his wife.

I hear that poems are growths on humankind’s
own mind, heroics of words that strive to drum
victory in expression. I know lines
of his verse got a Soviet plane to come

and that men do die miserably for lack
of what he held on foot in Yiddish lines
striding in anapest and amphibrach
to live toward rescue through a field of mines.

His verse no circumstance blackmailed away
knells consequence of our infernal flare
for making Hell a horrible cliché.
You need language for when you’re really there

to bite the human throat of the obscene
to go on living even if you’re dead
to know that a debased word still can mean
to sing against the pistol to the head

so long as there are mothers who can weep
so long as there are fathers who can kill
so long as there are humans who can sleep
so long as there is anything to will

About the Author
A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator and poet currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Yiddish, Arabic, Latin, Occitan, Russian, Old Irish have appeared in e.g. Metamorphoses, Blue Unicorn, Asymptote, Brazen Head and the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that.