Traduttore—Tradittore

It is difficult to identify which factor was more likely to trigger Kernerenko’s sudden national awakening: the rising Zionism, the Jewish socialist movement, or the fin de siecle focus on self-absorbed individual that made many accultur- ated Jews across Europe use their experience to construct their new dual identi­ties.

Sing, my eagle

My mighty eagle!

Your brothers do not know you yet.

Nor do they know your songs

And they do not know what you are.

Many poets sing among us

And each one has his own song.

But among them there are no songs

Better then yours, my friend.

Those whose heart has immersed into dirt

Who has left all hope

Who has abandoned Faith and God—

In all those it raises the spirit.

And your song brings a new strength

And it strengthens the soul of a sinner

And again he asks God, who is One,

For the strength to believe and to love.

Neither a doctor nor a herb will be able to do

What your words are able to perform:

Due to them a bandit falls in love,

And a fallen soul revives.

So sing, my eagle, to my brothers,

And pray together with them:

And may be not so fast,

But still it will come,

The time of Messiah sooner or later!⁵²

In order to convey the importance of the Zionist message (unnamed yet quite clear from the poem’s dedication), Kernerenko resorts to traditional Judaic metaphors.

It turns out, however, that some of his “Jewish” poems, which occasionally appeared in journals and anthologies as his own, were in fact his translations of Semen Frug (i860-1916), who wrote in Russian and Yiddish. Kernerenko turned to Frug for a number of reasons. Frug, nowadays semi-forgotten, was one of the most popular Jewish poets in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century. His songs commemorating the 1881 and 1903 pogroms were sung at public meetings and demonstrations throughout Russia. Perhaps much more impor­tant for Kernerenko was that Frug, like Kernerenko himself, was born in south­ern Ukraine, in a free settlement (and not in a shtetl), that he was a self-educated man, and, like Kernerenko, was not indifferent to the charms of the Ukrainian landscapes. That Frug was the first Jewish poet to write in Russian was perhaps significant for Kernerenko, who considered himself the first Jewish poet to write in Ukrainian. No less important for Kernerenko was Frug’s enthusiasm for, and spiritual attachment to, Ukraine and the Ukrainian language.⁵³

Kernerenko’s translation repertoire is telling. Frug’s famous poetic lamenta­tions and cumbersome biblical epic verses were of little interest to the Huliai- pole poet. On the contrary, some of Frug’s brief, ironic, and almost apocryphal poetic reinterpretations of biblical plots—and especially their strong national and patriotic content—inspired Kernerenko. From a considerable number of Frug’s lyrics, Kernerenko picked those that encouraged national thinking and ignited Zionist enthusiasm. Kernerenko chose those Yiddish poems in which Frug views Jewish historical experience in the Diaspora as nothing but what they call in Yiddish golus: exile, life under oppression outside the Promised Land, and perennial and unresolved anguish.

Kernerenko penned a version of Frug’s poem “Novyi rik” (A New Year), in which Jewish exile is symbolized in the metaphor of a harp that knows only one type of song—a classic image from the famous Psalm “By the Babylonian Rivers.” The forlorn exilic song bemoans the loss of the Zion and constantly re­minds Jews of a distant yet imminent happiness, freedom, and liberation from bondage.⁵⁵ Frug’s vision of the exile had a refreshing impact on Kernerenko’s utopian perception of Ukraine as the land of joy and freedom. Perhaps not with­out Frug’s impact, in the 1900s Kernerenko’s own poetry on Ukraine became less flattering and more socially engaged.

Kernerenko’s fascination with the classic Frug poem “Zamd un Shtern” (The Sand and the Stars; Ukr.: Pisok ta zirky) suggests that he perceived “na­tional” issues not only in a sociopolitical but also in a theological sense. In the poem, Frug addressed the Almighty’s prophecy of Abraham’s magnificent fu­ture, which, according to the plain sense of the Hebrew Bible, extended to all the chosen people.

Frug boldly challenges the power and omnipotence of the Almighty—“Di shtern, di shtern, vu zaynen zey, Got?”—yet Kernerneko’s theological humility does not allow him boldly to follow Frug. Instead he submissively pleads to the Almighty to expose the Jews to the light of the stars, if the fate of the stars is un­attainable.⁵⁶ Frug challenges, Kernerenko begs. As we will see later, however the-

ologically indecisive, Kernerenko seems to have resorted to the revolutionary motifs of Ukrainian poetry in order to find an appropriate Ukrainian vocabulary for Frug’s imagery. Kernerenko’s evolution in the first decade of the twentieth century suggests that his translations from Frug should be placed in the context of his consistent search for a better synthesis of his Ukrainian poetic upbringing and his Jewish themes.

In the early 1900s, Kernerenko added a new socioeconomic angle to his rep­resentation of the Ukrainian-Jewish synthesis, when among other things he sent to LNV his highly politically charged and socially oriented poem “Monopolia” (The Monopoly). Ivan Franko liked it so much that he placed it on the first page of LNVIn “Monopoly,” Kernerenko pondered the ramifications of the prohibi­tion on Jewish engagement in propinacja—the privilege to keep inns, brew beer and mead, and to distill and sell liquor, which dated back to the earliest privileges given to Jews by Polish magnates in the late medieval—early modern times.

Very much sympathetic to his Jewish brethren, Kernerenko assessed the post-1880s situation not so much from the Jewish viewpoint as from that of the Ukrainian peasant. Kernerenko found it more important that from then on Jews were no longer engaged in the ethically dubious business of distilling and selling alcohol. Now, maintained Kernerenko, no one had the right to insult a Jew with the nickname shynkar, an innkeeper, usually associated with one who exploited peasants by making them drunk. This unexpected conclusion (placed at the very end of the poem) demonstrates that Kernerenko, without betraying his Jewish themes, identified with the social concerns of the Ukrainian peasantry and, sig­nificantly, called Jews by the normative Galician ethnonym (zhydy) that was used by Ukrainian peasants and not by the urban Russified equivalent (ievrei). In­deed, the poetic quality of his poem falls short of its social significance:

Who could think that this could happen?

The lords have entirely fallen from grace

And have begun running the inns!

On top of that, they have started lending money on interest! Although the lords have spent everything they had on drink, They obtained more loans, and the banks opened for them their accounts. This did not help: the lords and quasi-lords

Have lost their lands and their garb because of vodka.

But the lords are special, for they are who they are,

Unlike the Jews, those notorious beggars!

The lords’ clothes are clean, their pants have stripes, Their jackets have buttons and their badges are sparkling!

How could they fall so low [they thought]

Whereas a Yid is sitting in an inn making his big buck!

Therefore Jews were kicked out of the inns

And the lords became innkeepers in their stead.

Would they be able to manage?

Whatever the lords do there, run inns or drink,

It is not our business: time is the best judge.

However, Jews are no more selling vodka

And nobody can insult a Jew cursing him an “innkeeper”!⁵⁷

Kernerenko claimed that whatever was more appropriate ethically was more ap­propriate for Jews. He suggested that egoistic and national economic concerns be sacrificed for the sake of the ethical reputation of his nation. Let Jews suffer from poverty but let them not be taken for the agents of Polish or Russian colo­nialism. In this case, they would sooner become as marginalized yet ethically im­peccable as their Ukrainian brethren and would find common grounds to talk to one another.

By the 1910s the national theme in Kernerenko’s work gained momentum. In 1909 the poet published his version of Frug’s Yiddish-language Zionist poem “Shtey oyf,” which could have very well become the Jewish national anthem had it been penned in Hebrew. The poem is written as a rhymed political motto. Frug claims that the East European exile, a new Egyptian bondage, with its hard labor, suffering, and oppression, has enslaved the Jew not only physically but also men­tally. The sweat has covered the Jew’s eyes, making him blind. Wake up, Jew, trumpets Frug, recognize your old mother’s voice calling you to get back, raise your old banner, the banner of Zion, and triumphantly return home.⁵⁸

To convey Frug’s message in Ukrainian, Kernerenko resorts to commonly used revolutionary metaphors articulated in the Ukrainian language by Lesia Ukrainka and Ivan Franko. “Vstavai, khto zhyvyi, v koho dumka povstala” (Raise, whoever is alive, whoever’s thought has rebelled), wrote Lesia Ukrainka in her celebrated “Dosvitni vohni” (Predawn Lights). “Upered za krai ridnyi ta voliu” (Forward, for the native land and freedom), penned Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi. Kernerenko coins his version in the language of the approaching national revo­lutionary awakening, reworking the same cliches: it is the banner of Zion that has to be “raised,” whereas his somewhat conservative movement “back home” is the opposite of Hrabovs’kyi’s socialist-minded “forward.” One could cautiously surmise that translating Frug’s verse into Ukrainian and finding equivalents in Ukrainian turn-of-the-century revolutionary metaphors, Kernerenko began shaping Ukrainian-Jewish poetry. And just as he started to forge the Ukrainian- Jewish poetic language, he realized that the point of the encounter between the two was also the point of departure.

Kernerenko cast this idea in his “Ne ridnyi syn” (A Stepson). Kernerenko firmly placed the poem within his own personal, intimate relations with Ukraine. One could find in “A Stepson” various confessions of loyalty to, and love of, Ukraine typical of Kernerenko’s earlier writings. But it is more subtle. In “A Stepson,” Kernerenko juxtaposes the romantic Shevchenkian image of the lonely poet-orphan with the populist image of Ukraine as a mother-nurse, creat­ing an unprecedented dichotomy: a stepson who is a Ukrainian poet of Jewish descent, and Ukraine, his stepmother.⁵⁹ Of course a stepmother is not the same as a mother-nurse and all too often connotes wickedness. Yet for Kernerenko, fil­ial empathy and the sense of the family have the upper hand over his personal sufferings.

Perhaps the two opening lines of Heine’s preface to his “Deutschland: Ein Wintermarchen” (Germany: A Winter Tale)—the preface later excluded from the editions of “Germany”—inspires the opening lines and the meter (four-foot iamb) of Kernerenko’s poem no less than Shevchenko’s imagery: “Ade, Paris, du teure Stadt, / Wir mussen heute scheiden,” that is, “Adieu, Paris, My dear town, / I need to leave you.”⁶⁰ Curiously enough, the amalgam of Shevchenko’s and Heine’s imagery informs dramatic relations between Kernerenko’s Jewish and Ukrainian identities. Here is my line-by-line translation of the poem, perhaps Kernerenko’s best, by no means pretending to substitute a genuine poetic ver­sion of it:

Fare-thee-well, my Ukraine—

I need to leave you;

Though for you I have sacrificed

My life and freedom and soul!

But I am your stepson,

And I know this only too well.

Among your other children

I live not but I suffer.

I cannot any more

Tolerate their mockery

Of the fact that your sons and I

Are of different faiths.

Yet you, my Ukraine,

I will love forever:

Albeit you treat me as a stepson,

Still you are my mom!⁶¹

An orphaned child under custody, the poet dedicates his muse, his love, and his life to his stepmother (za tebe ia otdav zhyttia i voliu i dushu) who, in turn, segre­gates him from her own children, poisoning his life with mockery (pro mizh druhykh ditei tvoikh ia ne zhyvy—strazhdaiu). The poet does not hesitate to real­ize that his faith—different from the faith of the other children in the family— is the only reason for the scornful attitude toward him (za te shcho ia i tvoi syny / Ne odnu maem viru). Attached to his family but no longer able to withstand hu­miliation, the poet pronounces his final farewell to his stepmother, who appar­ently had done nothing to protect him from the insults of her own offspring (proshchai, Ukraino moia). Nevertheless, though scorned, mocked, and humili­ated, the poet does not take the tone of an accuser. He claims that mistreatment and misunderstanding will never prevent him from eternally loving his step­mother (tebe zh Ukraino moia / Ia budu vik kokhaty).

Here Kernerenko articulates his Ukrainian-Jewish identity as an impossible cultural concoction that has no chance of survival outside his poetically shaped feeling, and that perhaps is not shared by anybody in his imaginary family, in­cluding his stepmother. A Jew is deeply attached to his Ukrainian family, calls it his family, yet is mistreated by his nearest kin. Does this imply he should aban­don his mother’s house and take to the road? Two last lines of the poem, almost a prophecy, became what could be dubbed the paradigm of Ukrainian-Jewish en­counter for a century to come. Their pathos transforms the bitterness of a humiliated yet egotistic self into the lofty hymn of a truly disinterested, selfless, and unrequired platonic love of a magnanimous poet. A Byron-like romantic hero adapted to Ukrainian folklore imagery, Kernerenko claims that although Ukraine treats him as her stepson, he rejects addressing her only as his legal guardian and insists on considering her his own “mom.” He overcomes his so­ciocultural segregation, his profound solitude, and his national bias, elevating his feeling to the level of European romantic humanism. A Jew and a poet, he is rejected—but does this imply that the object of his desire should not be cher­ished and poetically uplifted? His personal Ukrainian-Jewish identity is utopian through and through, yet Kernerenko seems to argue that Ukraine is a universal value that supersedes personal ambitions.

One can only guess whether Kernerenko sent this poem to the editors of LNV or to Franko himself. It is evident, however, that his Ukrainian fellows did not rush to publish the poem, which appeared only once in Rada, later in Menty natkhnennia, and unlike other Kernerenko verses it was not reproduced in poetic anthologies. The reason seems to be self-evident. Not only did Kernerenko forge in this poem an unheard of Ukrainian-Jewish self-awareness, but he also pointed to its imminent, if not incipient, dramatic end and to its romantically shaped utopian nature. This could hardly have pleased Ivan Franko, who argued for a feasible Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement. Not without bitterness, Kernerenko seems to have lost his hope.