Jane HirshfieldLedger

Abstract

Equally fascinating are the texts following the poems—where we also get a glimpse into the surprising complexity of translation approaches employed across this map of this endangered poetic world. For example, the Tamajaght poetry quoted above is a third cousin to the original— first transcribed by the poet, Hawad, from Tamajaght into a graphic illustrated version , rendering the poetry using a modified Tifinagh alphabet with added vowels; then it has passed through French translation by his scholar-wife, Hélène Claudot-Hawad, thence into English by Judith Fleiss. By the way, this poem about Ti-n-El (“She of the season of new grasses”) and others explore the forced exile and unresolved fate of the Tuareg people. Because of the dizzying variety of translation strategies and challenges, there is a necessary unevenness in translation, with some stilted lines and other minor stylistic clutter creeping in. No matter. This volume enchants, dignifies, educates, uplifts, transports , and ultimately may even help redeem and heal us, in our presently unhinged global frenzy—if only we let it. There is much more to do, of course— these sixty poets/languages represent but a slightest fraction of our endangered literary heritage now disappearing by the month. Even so, Chris McCabe has made something exceptional here. This is that rare collection that every one of us can treasure and pass on. I cannot hope strongly enough that this book may find its way into our libraries—and our hearts. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe Elisabeth Åsbrink And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain:The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War Trans. Saskia Vogel. New York. Other Press. 2020. 421 pages. A LIFETIME—seventy-five years— has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and other hellholes emblematic of the European extermination of perceived Otherness. Lest we forget, we need books like And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: a slow-burning, relentless investigation of the persecution of the Jews and, at the same time, a compassionate study of an exiled child and family bonds stretched to breaking point. Elisabeth Åsbrink is a brilliant journalist with a personal stake in exposing dark periods in contemporary history. The core narrative in 1947, her wonderfully readable “biography of a year,” is the post–World War II struggle of Europe’s surviving Jewry to find a refuge in Israel; the historical account is illuminated by the story of her father, a Jewish-Hungarian boy whose family is gradually eliminated. And in the Vienna Woods is an earlier work, and the child adrift is another Jewish boy, Otto Ullmann. Otto’s parents loved him, their only child, so well that they sent the thirteen-year-old away from Vienna within a year of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Just a few months later, it had become clear that Jews would be brutally punished for existing at all. Books in Review Jane Hirshfield Ledger New York. Knopf. 2020. 128 pages. A NEW VOLUME of poems by acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield is an event. After reading the poems in Ledger—a capacious, varied volume—it seems as if ordinary life is richer and deeper than before, yet it is hard to pin down why. Her limpid style, sometimes riddling yet never obscure, provides part of the answer. With every word, Hirshfield allows us to enter her poems and feel at home there. Even when she challenges us most forcefully , she does so together with us, holding our gaze, inhabiting a shared space. Not for nothing does she see poetry as a vehicle for transformation—and yet the poetic speaker feels like a friend rather than a guide or moralist . Humility is often her very subject: “In the end, / I was like others. / A person.” Hirshfield’s poems work against our typical , daily egocentrism. This interest unifies her oeuvre, allowing us to recognize her poems by their perspective and curiously voiceless voice rather than by more conventional means, such as imagery or leitmotifs. A Hirshfield poem is an exercise in opening the self. This is not an evacuation as much as an endless multiplication: until we see each character in a story...