Greetings from Angelus: Poems by Gershom Scholem

Abstract

of language and culture. “Names of birds” never uses English names for them and ends with these intriguing lines: “Hamsa/ Soham / Repeat this / Until the bird / And its meanings / Are merged as One.” In Vedic literature, this combination of two words, So’ham and Hamsa, is interpreted as “I myself am the Swan,” the swan symbolizing the supreme state of being. In a poem addressed to another poet, Agha Shahid Ali, she asks, “Shahid, you said / never to write that / word ‘soul’ so, how to explain / porous anatomy, that atomic stinging?” Naz deals with words in this metaphysical way and makes the lack of a clear-cut center or a well-defined home a constant refrain. Thus, even with a mundane object like an onion, she is able to say “lunar onions are just homeless tears waiting for the eyes to take them in.” Elsewhere she reflects, “Are we not all thumbnails / Filed away and forgotten / Under Time’s thumb?” In “Chappan Churri’ (Fifty six stabs), the word churri (knife) is autocorrected to cherry, Cheri, and “occasionally, chai.” “When I type / churri, autocorrect is also / a stab at language.” Thus, she considers herself stabbed fifty-six times like the woman in the story stabbed by her jilted lover. But “each wound gives her a new mouth,” and that’s Sophia Naz’s strength. Ravi Shanker N. Palakkad, India Gershom Scholem Greetings from Angelus: Poems Trans. Richard Sieburth. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2018. 150 pages. When Richard Sieburth published the first translations of Gershom Scholem’s poetry in Bomb magazine in 2002, it was a great revelation to Scholem’s dedicated readership . Scholem had not written his poetry with publication in mind—these were private poems, sent in letters to friends or hidden in his diaries for his eyes alone. Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), born Gerhard Scholem, came from an urbane German-Jewish family in Berlin. Among German philosophers there has been a long tradition of writing private poetry, sent to friends in letters but not written for publication. Walter Benjamin—Scholem ’s friend to whom most of the poems in Sieburth’s translation of Greetings from Angelus were sent or dedicated to—also wrote epistolary verse, as did the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger to his muse and lover, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. The friendship between Scholem and Benjamin was a deep and passionate intellectual communion that had begun when Scholem was seventeen and Benjamin twenty-three, and only ended in 1941 with Benjamin’s suicide (or murder) on the border of Spain in his flight from Nazioccupied France. Most of the poems that Scholem wrote before Benjamin’s death are private conversations, exchanges, responses , and interpretations centering on Benjamin and his ideas and works. There is a love poem in Greetings from Angelus that Scholem wrote to Grete Bauer, but even here Benjamin is doubly present—the poem’s erudite title, “Paraphrase of the Prose of the Diary,” has the subtitle “after Walter Benjamin” and the postscript “on first reading [Benjamin’s] ‘The Metaphysics of Youth.’” As Steven M. Wasserstrom, the editor of this volume, remarks in an endnote, Scholem confessed in a letter to Grete Bauer that she was—with Walter Benjamin—the “‘midpoint’ of his life” (Grete was to reject Scholem’s advances). Scholem was primarily a critic and commentator on the Kabbala and on other literary and philosophical texts, which is very apparent in the poetry in Greetings from Angelus. As a critic, he expressed his creativity through interpreting his philosophical and literary idols and, most importantly, God himself. In writing poetry , however, Scholem has chosen a platform in which poets traditionally speak in their own creative voices, espousing their own ideas, feelings, and judgments. Scholem’s voice is strong, and what surprises in his poetry is that the poems are in fact highly distilled critical responses to, and interpretations of, ideas and texts. The subject of his poetry is mostly focused on other people, specifically the literary figures and intellectual circles around which his career as a critic revolved. He used writing about others to communicate his own ideas, while nominally appearing to stay absent from his poetry. We see a great analytical mind at...