Pine by Leah Goldberg

[marina]

Hi! I recently rediscovered this poem after originally learning it in 8th grade or so. I posted it to poetry a while ago, I hope the repost is OK? The original is in Hebrew.

Pine
by Leah Goldberg
(Translation: Rachel Tzvia Back)

Here I will not hear the voice of the cuckoo. Here the tree will not wear a cape of snow. But it is here in the shade of these pines my whole childhood reawakens. The chime of the needles: Once upon a time – I called the snow-space homeland, and the green ice at the river's edge - was the poem's grammar in a foreign place. Perhaps only migrating birds know - suspended between earth and sky - the heartache of two homelands. With you I was transplanted twice, with you, pine trees, I grew - roots in two disparate landscapes.

כאן לא אשמע את קול הקוקיה. כאן לא יחבוש העץ מצנפת שלג, אבל בצל האורנים האלה כל ילדותי שקמה לתחיה. צלצול המחטים: היֹה היה - אקרא מולדת למרחב השלג, לקרח ירקרק כובל הפלג, ללשון השיר בארץ נוכריה. אולי רק ציפורי-מסע יודעות – כשהן תלויות בין ארץ ושמיים – את זה הכאב של שתי המולדות. אתכם אני נשתלתי פעמיים, אתכם אני צמחתי, אורנים, ושורשיי בשני נופים שונים

Comments

[dhobikikutti]

Perhaps only migrating birds know -
suspended between earth and sky -
the heartache of two homelands.

Oh Marina!
Thank you!

[marina]

Haha, I'm glad you liked! :D

[jolantru]

This is beautiful!

[glass_icarus]

Oh, I love this. :>

[seekingferret]

Wow, that's really beautiful.

It always disappoints me when translations miss the soundplays and wordplays of the original. The translation is gorgeous, but it doesn't express the relationship between ילדותי and מולדת in quite the same way as the original. I kind of want to play around with how a translation that used 'birthplace' instead of 'homeland' would work. I don't think it's necessarily the right translation either, because using homeland in English suggests a more visceral and permanent connection than birthplace does, but the wordplay is lost. (I suspect she also used homeland because of metrical constraints when dealing with the comparatively terse style of Hebrew poetry. That line is already crammed with her somewhat nonsensical 'snow-space' clearly trying to use as few syllables as possible to be faithful to the original meaning.)

[dhobikikutti]

Randomly popping in to say this comment is exactly the sort of discussion I hope to see happening in this comm, because you can only talk about translations with someone else who knows both languages, and both cultures, and even though I don't knew Hebrew, I can empathise with the disinction made between words, as I contemplate translations made from one of the languages I speak.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I'm glad I found this community since I'm always interested in the problems of translation. I'm endlessly fascinated with the fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez apparently said he prefers Gregor Rabassa's English translation of Cien años de soledad to his original Spanish. It's mystifying to me, because even though the English translation is a beautiful novel, it's obviously not conveying all the same things as the original and I can't fathom an author saying that somebody else has represented his ideas more clearly than he could.

To try to explain what I was talking about above in a way a non-Hebrew speaker can follow, both the word that Back translates as "childhood" and the word she translates as "homeland" come from the same three letter root, Yod-Lamed-Dalet, which refers to things involving birth. "Moledet", the word she translates as homeland, literally refers to 'land of my birth'. Which, because the poet refers to her childhood, is clearly a tension in the language that develops over the course of the poem. You can only be born in one place, but you can't have more than one homeland. The poet has been adopted by (actually transplanted to... all the language being botanical) another moledet, but only one moledet is the moledet of her yaldut. And the Hebrew accomodates that tension in a way that the English... almost does.

[marina]

It always disappoints me when translations miss the soundplays and wordplays of the original.

Man, tell me about it. I started reading poetry in anything-but-Russian very, very late, relatively. I don't think I read poetry in English/Hebrew till I was 16-17, although I'd been writing poetry in English by the time I was 14. But I read Shakespear and every other major poet I was exposed to in the Russian translations.

And Russian translation culture, for a few good decades at least, was so amazingly brilliant. I can't read Tolkien in English - the language turns me off. It's too outdated, too stifled. The Russian flows. I can't imagine how I'd read Dumas in translation to anything but Russian. In all the translations I've seen (and in the original French) the language feels outdated. In Russian the prose is beautiful and measured by it feels like these people could be standing in my livingroom. I could adopt their speech patterns and not encounters too many O_o looks.

What I'm trying to say is that I feel you. The older I got and the more I started getting into translation (both doing my own and sampling the works of others) the more I learned to appreciate how heart-breakingly brilliant a good translation is, especially with poetry, and how difficult to achieve.

[seekingferret]

You're not the only Russian person who's said things like that to me. I have a friend who's the only person I know who's read as much early 20th century American SF as me, but she read it all in Russian translations and always complains that in the English the language is stilted and boring.

And I reply, "Well, yes, but that's the way it always is and you learn to deal with it and focus on the ideas." But she says, "But when I read it in Russian, the language was actually entertaining!"

[poemsintranslation.blogspot.com]

Heh I actually translated this poem a while back. Go here to find my translation, along with a recording of the hebrew:

http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/03/leah-goldberg-pine-from-hebrew.html