The Spectacular Difference: Selected poems by Zelda

Abstract

When I sent my Israeli friend a copy of Marcia Falk’s translation of Zelda’s poems, she said she felt like a child with an unexpected birthday present. Indeed, Marcia has given us all a present in her selection and translation of Zelda’s work. Israeli poet Zelda Schneurson, who wrote under her first name, was born into the Habad dynasty in 1914 in Russia, came to mandatory Palestine with her parents when she was twelve, and spent most of the rest of her life in Jerusalem. Her life was complicated and very difficult, but her poems just kept getting better. These selections are translated from Zelda’s books Leisure (1967), The Invisible Carmel (1971), Be Not Far (1974), Surely a Mountain, Surely Fire (1977), The Spectacular Difference (1981), and Beyond All Distance (1984). The volume is enriched by sensitive, scholarly introductions to many of the poems, as well as notes at the end of the volume explaining Marcia’s own process and choices as a translator. The notes include frequent learned references to what Marcia, the scholar, understands thoroughly and what Zelda was born and bred to understand—the daily and Holy Day liturgy, rabbinic literature and Jewish mysticism in its various forms through the centuries. Marcia has remarked that to translate a poem is actually to engage in the act of creating a new poem in another language. I would respond: yes and no. Looking at the translations that have been made of my own poems into three other languages, at times I find that the translator has found the real poem I meant to write—better than I managed to do myself! But this is not what happens in translating a brilliant, transcendent poet like Zelda.