הכניסי תחת כנפך/ביאליק | Under Your Wing/Bialik | Приюти меня под крылышком

[hagar_972]

The poem Hachnisini tachat k'nefech ("Bring me under your wing", female addressee) is one of the better-known poems by Haim Nachman Bialik, an early Hebrew poet often considered Israel's national poet. (I cannot in good conscious fully get behind this title, because we had no-less-good ones after him, as seminal as Bialik's corpus is.) One of the primary reasons that Hachnisini is so well-enough is that it's been set to music a dozen-plus times and recorded about a gazillion; suffice to say, it's popular enough that musical reality shows contestants will pick it for their auditions. (I'm partial to Nechama Hendel's version from the 1950s, which tune - like so many Israeli songs - is ripped off Eastern European folk melodies; the best-known one is arguably Arik Einstein's from the 1980s. It's also worth noting that the tradition of setting poetry to music is primarily associated with Israeli-Hebrew rock, not folk.)

The poem is brought below in Hebrew, with translations into English and Russian. These translations were rendered in by Ze'ev Jabotinsky (born Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky). Jabotinsky was himself a complex figure, best known as a political leader and visionary. The Russian translation is earlier, and was published in 1916 as part of an anthology of Russian-translated Hebrew poetry. The English translation is later, presumably 1920s, and was given as a gift to Ronald Storrs, then the British Military Governor of Palestine.

I cannot evaluate the Russian translation as I do not speak or read the language, but the English translation is exquisite. The translations and their background were found via this blog post (in Hebrew).



Приюти меня под крылышком,
Будь мне мамой и сестрой,
На груди твоей разбитые
Сны-мечты мои укрой.

Наклонись тихонько в сумерки,
Буду жаловаться я:
Говорят, есть в мире молодость –
Где же молодость моя?

И ещё поверю шёпотом:
И во мне горела кровь;
Говорят, любовь нам велена –
Где и что она, любовь?

Звёзды лгали; сон пригрезился –
И не стало и его;
Ничего мне не осталося,
Ничего.

Приюти меня под крылышком,
Будь мне мамой и сестрой,
На груди твоей разбитые
Сны-мечты мои укрой…

Comments

[birke]

I enjoyed listening to Nechama Hendel's interpretation. I don't understand a word of Hebrew, but it's a fun singing language.

Some aspects of the English translation are really appealing... e.g. the idea of taking your unanswered prayers somewhere else -- to someone else, it sounds like. But I can't tell who the writer is addressing; is it intentionally so?

[hagar_972]

*grins* Nechama Hendel has gorgeous diction, too. It's one of the reasons I prefer her rendition. I also think that the Eastern European melodies better complement the song - Bialik composed in Ashkenazi modus (stress on the first syllable of each word) rather than in Sepharadi (stress on last or before-lass syllables). Contemporary Hebrew is spoken strictly in the Sepharadi; Ashkenazi has deliberately been driven extinct.

And yes, the ambiguity around the addressee is likely intentional. The poem doesn't give any direct indication of the addressee's identity, other than she is female. (Hebrew is fully gendered, so the very first word of the poem already frames the addressee as female.)

The emotional content of the poem is rather typical to Bialik's biographical poem - the anger, the suffering, the sense of being exiled from one's own life. It's particularly interesting in this poem because it makes multiple suggestions regarding the addressee. "Be my mother" is pretty much what it looks on the surface, but "Be my sister" can also be a lover in the language of the Song of Songs (achoti kala, an idiom which appears in chs.4 and 5); Bialik's work (both poetry and prose) often relies on scriptural allusions. And then there's the third suggestion, through the idiom of the stars (repeating idiom across Bialik's corpus as well as among his contemporaries), which suggests the Sh'khina, the Presence, the female aspect of the Lord. This connects to the biographical elements - as a child he was given religious education (we're talking 19th century here), but like many of his generation he left and turned to a secular life, to the promise of the Enlightenment - but then later in life discovered he had no past, no roots to returns to.

(Really, I'd say that trying to find a past to return to but being unable to accept the actual past that way is a theme of contemporary Israeli culture. Zionism was based on a massive past-erasing enterprise. The fault line that Bialik identified in his own life runs through the entire Zionist enterprise and so, Jewish-Israeli society.)

[dhobikikutti]

Thanks for sharing!

[hagar_972]

I'm glad you enjoyed, and thank you!

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