HEARING EYE Publications

 

Modern Poetry in Translation No 21, 2003

Original Translations

On Arthur Jacobs
by Daniel Weissbort

A belated comment on AC Jacobs's Collected Poems & Selected Translations, edited by John Rety and Anthony Rudolf, foreward by John Silkin; Menard Press/Hearing Eye (in association with the European Jewish Publication Society), 1996, £13.99.

Each time I saw John Rety of Hearing Eye, and long after he had given up mentioning Arthur Jacobs's Collected Poems & Selected Translations, which Hearing Eye co-published with Tony Rudolf's Menard Press, I experienced a twinge of Jewish guilt. I had promised to write a piece on this book and to try and get it published somewhere, failing which I would publish it myself in MPT. So, seven years have elapsed since this remarkable collection of poems and translations appeared, and this may be my last chance...

I begin to look for an angle, one that might justify the delay. There are no angles...

Arthur was a quiet man and his poetry is firmly quiet as well. So quiet that it seems to have escaped the notice of all but those who were tuned to him in the first place, like Tony Rudolf, the late John Silkin, John Rety, and, well, myself, and a number if others of course, who accidentally, as it were, became aware of Arthur's writing. In a letter published in the Menard catalogue, Ted Hughes wrote: "Tony Rudolf sent me the volume two days ago and I've been reading this. Amazing that we can be wholly unaware of, in the writing of one's contemporaries. We cover our ears from the din, perhaps, and miss crucial signals. Certainly I'd missed Jacobs whom now I'm getting to know with great pleasure."

Generationally, Arthur Jacobs and I are related. Our life paths even crossed or almost crossed. For instance, he shared the top floor of 10 Compayne Gardens with John Silkin at the time when the West Hampstead house was owned by Bernice Rubens and Rudi Nassauer, from whom I bought it.

And then there is the book by Arthur that Tony Rudolf published at Menard, A Proper Blessing. It is among the half dozen or so Menard titles - along with, for instance, Primo Levi's poems - that indelibly marked my literary sensibility, if that's not putting it too grandiosely.

But I suppose it was Arthur's involvement in translation that connected us, to the extent that we ever connected. Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (First Series, Autumn 1974) was devoted to Israeli poets and was guest edited by the late Robert Friend, another Menard author I would not be without. The issue kicked off with translations by Arthur of all eleven poems published by Avraham Ben-Yitzhak during his life. This followed by a few poems, again translated by Arthur, of another founding father of modern Hebrew poetry, David Yogel. Ben-Yitzhak was born in Galicia in 1883, Yogel in Podolia, Russia in 1891. The translations, as English poems, struck me at the time as utterly convincing, lucid, precise, though the subject matter was sometimes quite oblique, mysterious even. I was proud to be able to publish Ben-Yitzhak's collected works, although these were not actually all the poems he had written. When I told Tony Rudolf that I was finally writing something about Arthur Jacobs and was, of course, alluding to Ben-Yitzhak, he drew my attention to a note in the Collected Poems and Translations, quoting Leah Goldberg (another notable Menard author): "He (Ben-Yitzhak) was the first Hebrew poet whose watch displayed not merely specific Jewish time, but rather the time kept by world literature at the same hour."

Both the Ben-Yitzak and the David Vogel translations were reprinted in the collection under review, including, among others, Bialik, Amichai, Ravikovitch (all Menard authors), Zach, Carmi. The editors talk of the difficulty sometimes of determing whether they were dealing with a translation or an original poem by Jacobs (some 'sounded like translations'). Robert Friend wrote: '...It is hard to believe that his translations of David Vogel are translations... He has made Vogel's tone, the delicate nuances, his very own.' It seems to me that the boundary between Jacob's own poems and his translations is indeed quite indeterminate. Perhaps the same could be said of other poet-translators of this calibre, insofar as a poet will translate, if at all, those poets with whom some empathy is felt or whose work in some way complements - one might almost say completes - their own work.

The Menard/Hearing Eye book, bringing together both original work and original translation, to coin a phrase, is particularly interesting in this regard. I was struck by the similarity between Jacob's Jacobs and Jacob's Vogel or Ben-Yitzak. The translations read altogether like original texts, which is not quite the same as saying that 'they do not read like translations'. Is this simply to do with the affinity Jacobs felt for these poets? A problem may seem to pose itself that has exercised contemporary translators and translation theorists i.e. the contrast or opposition between domesticating and foreignizing translations. I doubt whether Arthur Jacobs was much concerned with such questions. To my mind, this essential humility and the fact that he was well employed doing what he was doing surely render all such discussions irrelevant.

And yet I continue to be bothered! If what I have hinted at above makes any sense, then clearly Jacobs domesticates. The translations and his own poems are, in a general sense, indistinguishable. And we are told that translations now, if they are to avoid the stigma of having, as it were, tamed (domesticated) the foreign beast, should not shrink from sounding foreign. As suggested above, injunctions or instructions drawing their inspiration from this version of political correctness sound problematical if not simply dogmatic when one is dealing with a devoted writer like Arthur Jacobs.

I think it is Arthur's oddness or uniqueness, noted by Tony Rudolf in his AC Jacobs obituary (The Independent, 1 April 1994), when he quotes Forster on Cavafy, 'at a slight angle to the universe', that guarantees the authenticity of his translations as well. Which, alas, is to say that there may be another obstacle in the way of a more general appreciation of his poet's work. His circumstances, as a Jew and a Scotsman, are perhaps not so unusual but they are unusual enough. He is twice marginalised, and what is more each marginalisation, as it were, cancels the other out. So it comes about that he or his reputation does not benefit from the light being shed on the borderlands of our literature, 'a bit east of the Gorbals/in around the heart' as Tony Rudolf, quoting the poet himself, concludes his piece for the Independent (the paper cut it). Nevertheless, Arthur continued to send in (or out?) reports from this so remote and yet so close region. It was natural for him to translate from the ancestral tongue and I am convinced that this helped him to further refine his mother but not ancestral language, English. I should like to have quoted lines from many of his poems, but instead I urge readers to buy the book. Arthur Jacobs's contribution to English literature may not be immediately assimilated, but I share the conviction of his intrepid publishers that it will find its niche.



Chapman

Miraculous, Broken Poems
AC Jacobs's Collected Poems & Selected Translations

Sebastian Barker

A C Jacobs, who died in 1994 aged 57, was a Scottish Jew by inheritance, a European by inclination and a poet of singular significance by any fair rating. He published no more than 46 poems of his own in book form in his life, leaving behind 106 which both editors of this excellent volume thought worthy of collection and a further 22 about which one or other of them felt some reservation. The book also contains a reasonable number, 53, published and unpublished translations from the Hebrew of poets such as David Vogel and Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, which add the essential dimension of Jacobs's work as a translator.

The book is a discovery. In a time of hurriedly manufactured poetry, that of A C Jacobs stands out as the genuine article. The reason why we may not have heard very much of Jacobs before now is also, curiously enough, the reason why we may not retain our ignorance of him any longer. This brief review hopes to suggest some of the reasons why. His concerns, and his art in voicing them, reach across a historical awareness as deep as it is detached, a wit and a compassion as necessary as they are enlightened, and a depth of feeling as religious as it is unen-closed by dogma, Jewish or otherwise. Such a phenomenon is rare; he might be described as a poet's poet. At its best, his work possesses that purity of diction, emotion and precision, which leaves behind it the sensation of something said unsaid before, which could not be said in any other way.

As John Rety of Hearing Eye remarks, A C Jacobs is an English poet. He may have heard and reproduced the dialect of his native Gorbals in Glasgow or the Hebrew of his Jewish contemporaries in Israel, but it is in the English tradition that his poetry lives. This is partly what makes him such an exciting discovery. He brings to the tradition an insider's view of the Jewish diaspora with its long history of exile and persecution. Yet paradoxically he appears just as much 'at home' whatever his national backdrop happens to be. He offers insight into how it is possible to be both uprooted and rooted at the same time.

In a poem called 'By Kiryat Shemona' after a town in northern Israel, he describes the hills there

"in the beginning/
Baked with fine purple".

". . . over these hills, the first/
Forms".

That which comes later "is lost among codes/
And poetry". He does not leave it at that.

"What came down/
To a significant wandering/
In the desert, to an eventual/
Sky of massacre is sunk/
Beyond the cleverest probing."

He finishes where he began: "But in the beginning,/
Clearly and beyond speech, there were/
These hills".

The word clearly is irrefutable. The poem as a whole is like a glassless lens on the genesis of vision.

The Scot, the Jew, the Europhile will all find in him something worthy of respect. Characteristically, he creates space beyond national culture. The weight of history on his shoulders allows him no other way. This may in part help to explain his obscurity during his lifetime: we ourselves lived in too ahistorical and national a popular culture to have prized him as he deserved. Nor is it insignificant that Jon Silkin's famous poem about the slaughter of Jews in York in 1190 was influenced by Jacobs's poem 'On a trip to York' - not the other way round. It is evident, too, that not many can do anything but hold a candle to Jacobs's poem, written at the age of 21, titled 'Poem in memory of all the Jewish girls who were made prostitutes for German soldiers and then suffered the ultimate martyrdom'. Raped then incinerated? By all means. The pathos he brings to bear puts to shame whole ranks of contemporary poetry.

But it must not be thought there is anything heavy-handed or moral-mongering about Jacobs. Eichmann, the Inquisition, nuclear weapons, Golders Green and Hampstead Heath all emerge in a balanced perspective. A cool, considered music shapes the heart of it. When the bleakness of his vision forces him to cry out, this is what we hear:

The books and scrolls of our suffering
Outweigh the huge stone image of our God.
And elegies rise, with their sickness, in our throats
More surely than the wrapped, counted words of prayer.

('The Infinite Scale')

Jacobs wrote in a climate of seriousness which had
"long ago classified . . . God/
Among the more puerile myths of mankind"
('Verses of Anxiety').

He had no security to set against this, however. He had no "divine backing" for his "proffered words": "I, the groping seer, can't answer, for/
The shackled absolutes are smashed, the carriers/
Of the Message are madmen in the park"
('Against the ideologies').

While Spinoza and Freud helped to unseat the tradition of his inherited beliefs, the blood of his relatives and ancestors "Ran down the gutters of empires"
('I choose neither . . .').

In one of his most successful poems, 'In early Spring', we find him walking in Hampstead. He is fashioning his credo:

And I hear most the miraculous, broken poems
That were made in the enclosures of insanity
Whose authors heard the chanting of the Inquisition
And smelt the smoke of the crematoria
And knew there was no escape, yet wrote
To show how life is at the verges of humanity.

Their great sound grew, and in that company
I walked past the pond and down the hill,
Aware that nothing was ended. With this Spring
They rose to a passionate renewal,
And I must serve their freedoms with my own.

 

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