A month ago, the Congress for Jewish Culture hosted a zoom reading for my collection of Yosef Kerler translations. I read the translations, while Kerler’s son, Dov-Ber Kerler, read the originals. You can watch a recording of the event on Youtube:
For how long will copper rain down? Storks are coming here
to winter, but from above there lightly fall
their broad, exhaling sails, and they veil
the falling human beings below.
For how long will copper rain down? Victories weep
in the chasm. And the burned-out eyes of a young boy
in a field hospital – march toward his bride. She will need
to tear down the sun for him, the sun will be her dowry.
For how long will copper rain down? A strange alphabet
is being born right now of feet and eyes and hands.
Shake the dust off your shoulder, petrified prophet,
and read what has been written, no other can.
Now copper has ceased to rain down. And the prophet
reveals himself before the alphabet of feet and eyes and hands
and reads it. And reads it into a scroll of parchment
for coming generations.
Poem by Avrom Sutzkever
Translated from Yiddish by Maia Evrona
For the anniversary of the passing of Leonard Cohen:
One Way to Say Goodbye
He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.
© Maia Evrona
In November 2016, in the shellshocked first days after the election of Donald Trump, I found myself in Athens, vacillating on whether to make a pilgrimage to the island of Hydra. I have had lifelong health problems, and short side trips tire me out more than they might the average person, though these days I manage a remarkable amount of physical activity when staying in one place. Beyond that caution, however, was a deeper hesitation: whether to set foot in a place that had lived in my imagination since adolescence, when I encountered the music of Leonard Cohen.
I have been fortunate to travel enough of the world to learn that seeing a place that played a significant role in the creation of a favorite artist’s work carries almost as much risk as meeting that artist himself. A land that functions as a kind of origin myth becomes instead a stop in the gritty experiment of one’s own life. When I was a teenager, I had studied the various black and white photographs of Leonard Cohen in Hydra in a faded, secondhand songbook of his music, particularly intrigued by one photograph of him playing guitar alone on his terrace looking out over the rooftops, in the opposite direction from the sea. By the time that book found its way into my hands, Cohen had already long been saying that Hydra, the “laboratory of [his] youth,” was no longer the island it had been to him, but rather just another place, like most others in the world. I often read that Hydra was now an upscale destination of boutique shops, a playground for the superrich to dock their yachts, hardly accessible to the assortment of writers, singers and drifters that had offered Cohen community in the moment when his talent was blossoming.
The reality that Hydra’s days of bohemian utopia were long past was not the only reason the island seemed distant when I studied the photographs in that songbook as a teenager: at that time in my life, I was not healthy enough to travel. If I did become so, I told myself, I would have to do it as Cohen had—go somewhere and stay a long while, to minimize the physical difficulty of traveling to and fro—but I would have to find my own Hydras.
I did, eventually, become healthy enough to travel, but I hadn’t found a place or a community quite like I imagined Hydra to have been. And now, here I was in Athens, after a few weeks in quiet Crete, the noise of the city compounding the shock of the election, in those first days when it felt as if someone had died. And, suddenly, I decided that I did want to see Hydra.
I booked a hotel, and a ferry for the morning, and I tried to go to sleep. In the morning, as I rose to leave, I learned that someone had died indeed: Leonard Cohen.
One Way to Say Goodbye
He passes away while democracy falters
on its way to the USA, just before the holiday
for Hydra’s patron saint. The same
bells ring, the same processions are made,
the same these priests have been making for centuries.
The poets and writers and drifters of the sixties
are gone. No one plays a guitar under the pine tree
at Dousko’s now that the tourists, too, are gone for the winter.
The electricity he lamented and running water
have stayed so the few restaurants play
recordings of Bird on a Wire and Hey, That’s No Way
for me and the priests. Tea and oranges, flowers
and pomegranates multiply at his door. Who am I here,
a poet after the poets and writers and drifters
have disappeared? This is the way
I have always listened to Leonard Cohen anyway,
on my own processions through streets,
sitting in doorways under the moon,
alone in a room. Here are the rooms
where he wrote songs I traveled through
when I was sick for a decade, over the wall
is the terrace from the photograph I studied:
Leonard Cohen playing guitar in the eighties
after the other poets and writers, the drifters were gone,
Leonard Cohen singing to the rooftops, to the mountain.
© Maia Evrona 2021
I am currently back in the United States after nine months in Spain and Greece, and am awaiting a new visa. In the meantime, in these months between the anniversary of his birth and the anniversary of his death, and during the Days of Awe of course, I have been thinking of this poem I wrote last year about being in Hydra the week Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016.
I arrived in Barcelona almost a month ago, and gave a poetry reading at La Casa Adret within a week. The reading is available to watch on YouTube. There are poems about the Ballad of Mauthausen, about being in Hydra the week Leonard Cohen passed away, about Portbou and Los Angeles, where I was living before I became an itinerant poet again. There are also lovely musical performances by my friend Eva McGowan, as well as readings of Nelly Sachs in German and Catalan.
I will probably be giving a second reading at La Casa Adret in March so stay tuned!
Greetings from my current abode on the west coast of the USA! On Sunday, June 13th, I will be taking part in a reading with other poets who contributed to the anthology 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (which can be purchased here: https://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/other-books/101-jewish-poems-for-the-third-millennium). The reading is at 1pm EST, 4pm PST. I’ll share the link shortly.
On June 24th, I will be participating in a one-time follow-up to the Worker’s Circle series In the Midst. This was a series of panels that the Worker’s Circle sponsored last winter, exploring systemic racism through the lens of Yiddish culture. One of the panels focused on my translation of a poem by Yoysef Kerler, titled “If I were in Alabama” (watch a recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1fUCVhqcOE) This series generated a great deal of interest, so the Worker’s Circle is hosting a follow-up with the panelists from all three programs. The precise time is to be announced.
Lastly, I had the good fortune to receive a second Fulbright grant to Spain and Greece, after my previous award was interrupted due to the pandemic. I am due to arrive in Spain in November, and will be giving a reading of my poetry at one of my host institutions, Mozaika/La Casa Adret, that same month, as part of their Sefer Book Festival. Precise date and time to be announced.
President Biden opted for Hallelujah at the Covid memorial service, but I’ve been thinking that this Yehuda Amichai poem encapsulates this moment, after this past year, perfectly (as much as I love Leonard Cohen).
With all due respect for Seamus Heaney and Hallelujah, I keep thinking that this is the poem that should have been included in the memorial service and inaug...
Up next: a video of dancing tango to Democracy is Coming to the USA? Now that would have been a fitting Leonard Cohen song for the inauguration! This version by The Lumineers seems to work best for tango:
Tracklist:1. The Lumineers - Donna2. The Lumineers - Life in the City3. The Lumineers - Gloria4. The Lumineers - It Wasn't Easy to Be Happy for You5. The Lum...
A poem from my series on Jewish holidays, which was recently published in 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. Unlike some people, I have no mixed feelings about Chanukah. I think it’s the holiday that best speaks to modern Jewish experience. I’m wearing Greek earrings in the video for good measure.
I’ve decided to upload various pieces I’ve published over the years here over the next few weeks. Here is a piece called “The Big Black Sky,” which first appeared in a literary journal called Killing the Angel. It is also the foreword to my memoir on growing up with a chronic illness.
The Big Black Sky
When I was a child, I couldn’t see the stars. Bad eyesight. I know my eyes once were good, but, of that time, I have no memory. There had been nothing for me to take note of, nothing in my perception of the world that seemed to differ from anyone else’s. The change may have been quick enough to come between the annual or, perhaps, biannual vision screenings conducted by my elementary school, or it may simply have gone undetected. I do not know how long it lasted, yet for a distinct time I was unaware that the world was blurrier than it should have been. I thought everyone saw as I did.
But there were the stars. The few stars I could see were fuzzy and gray, like clumps of dust, not the brilliant silver I knew they should be. During summer, my father used to trace the constellations. I would nod, my bare feet resting on moist, dark green grass, or the hard pavement of our driveway. “Oh, I see!” I would say. But I didn’t.
I remember him nearly shouting, “Hey! There’s one!” whenever a shooting star went by. My eyes followed his pointed finger but I could never find the star to which it led. All I saw was the big black sky. And I began to take note.
Fear grew in me those summer nights, at the vision screening in school; I was the one with a little something wrong with me. Then I got my glasses. “Wow, it’s so different!” I exclaimed, looking out the window at the detailed texture I could now see in the tree trunks lining the road on the way home from the ophthalmologist.
Again, my father and I were outside, my father tracing constellations. I studied the stars. I looked at my father, then back at the stars again. The constellations didn’t look like the objects, animals and human figures I had been told about and seen illustrated up close. Not to me. And I took note again.
I continued looking at the night sky by myself. I stopped hoping for shooting stars on my tiptoes, with my heart beating up into my throat. I gained a blurry idea of where constellations were supposed to be, though the idea of them began to make me smile. It seemed to me that throughout history people had been tracing those particular patterns in the dark because we are told that they are there. But standing underneath the sky on the clearest nights, I noticed that glittering silver lines seemed to connect the brightest stars sometimes, like the strings on a harp. Perhaps they were only an optical illusion, yet they seemed capable of making the whole sky music. No one had told me about them. At first, I thought maybe those lines were shooting stars, then I realized they were just connections shining all over and through the big black sky.
I recently participated in the virtual American Literary Translators conference. My bilingual reading of Sutzkever, Kerler and Margolin can be viewed/listened to here:
Given that this was intended to be the last month of my Fulbright Award, and the Fulbright Greece website has now shifted to featuring new grantees, I am uploading my Fulbright Greece profile here. I am still committed to my project, which offered a fresh and yet ancient perspective on Jewish poetic tradition, one badly needed particularly when considering Yiddish poetry, which is so often limited by preconceptions about the Yiddish language.
I’ll be exploring ways of continuing this project over the next few months. In the meantime, as I’ve written previously, one of the poems I wrote while in Spain was recently published by my Spanish host-institution and can be read on their website: http://mozaika.es/magazine/portbou-and-shabbat-shabbos-by-maia-evrona/
As encouragement, and to keep a bit of Spain and Greece with me here in New England, I recently bought a pomegranate tree:
Speaking of the pomegranate, I recently published a few translations of Yoysef Kerler, one of which features it. Pomegranates have inspired some of my own poems too, a fruitful fruit for poetry! I hope the tree will inspire more.
Here are the translations:
https://theoffingmag.com/translation/gentleness/
https://lunchticket.org/issue-archive/summer-fall-2020/
Two of my poems were recently published by Mozaika, which was my Fulbright host institution in Barcelona. I wrote the first poem in and on the train back from visiting Portbou, right on the French-Spanish border. Historically, many refugees have passed through Portbou, both those fleeing Spain and those fleeing Europe. It is known for being the place where Walter Benjamin committed suicide, after crossing the border and being told that Franco planned to send him back to France. Benjamin assumed this would mean into the hands of the Nazis.
Hannah Arendt visited Portbou, hoping to find Benjamin’s grave, after escaping from the Gurs internment camp at the foothills of the French Pyrenees and crossing into Spain herself—a crossing that may have been easier due to Benjamin’s suicide. His death had cast Franco in a poor light on the international stage, causing Franco to relent when faced with other prominent refugees. She called the cemetery in Portbou, which I photographed above, the most “fantastically” beautiful place she had ever seen. She would have agreed with my assessment, in my poem, on the potential beauty of being a tourist. Elsewhere, she wrote one of my favourite lines about travel: “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.”
My poem was inspired by the strangeness of visiting a place like Portbou as a tourist, and by my own internal questions about whether I counted as a tourist or not. The irony is that when I left Barcelona, suddenly and unexpectedly due to the pandemic, there were no tourists at all left in the world, only people rushing to return home, or sheltering in place.
The second poem Mozaika published this time around was one I wrote a few years ago, but it feels surprisingly fitting for this time, on multiple levels. Part of the reason I dislike feeling held hostage by holidays, even those I appreciate the premise of, like Shabbat, is because I was held hostage by illness for so much of my early life. Now of course, I, and the rest of the world, are being affected by illness in a completely different way from my situation growing up.
You can read both and listen to me recite them, on Mozaika’s website: http://mozaika.es/magazine/portbou-and-shabbat-shabbos-by-maia-evrona/
About a month ago, Mozaika also published a third poem of mine, about Shavuot, which you can also find on their website.
I arrived in Spain at the beginning of December for my seven-month Fulbright scholar award. For months, I had intended to include an update here. Ironically what I wanted to write was that the first month in Spain on the Fulbright award had enabled me to fully understand what a gift time can be. It’s rare to have that sort of support, as a writer: over half a year to focus and see one’s thinking evolve.
Of course, it turned out that I had far less time than I thought. The Fulbright Program was suspended on March 20th, as I’ve already written elsewhere: https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/fulbright-covid-19/. I’m now back in the United States.
I don’t know that my Fulbright project will ever be finished in the way I expected, but perhaps writing projects never are finished in the way one expects. The interests and concerns that led me to apply for this award will remain, but the evacuation was disruptive, and I haven’t yet regained my train of thought. As a writer I’m in a privileged position compared to other scholars, because my main genre in past years has been poetry. Sometimes the poetic muse responds surprisingly well to disruption.
Still, I believed in the project I had intended to carry out. My goals included increasing Holocaust awareness in Spain and Greece, fostering better communication between the two countries and the wider Jewish world, and between Jewish communities themselves. I partnered with tiny cultural institutions that operate amid atmospheres that can at times be hostile.
Given my personal history and my status as a Jewish person whose work is steeped in Jewish history and the Holocaust, I have a healthy skepticism regarding authority and institutions, no matter how prestigious. While I was in Spain, I thought a great deal about how, while the Fulbright affirmation was nice, the most important element of the grant was simply having time and space to work, the freedom to make connections with others. What most moved me about the support from Fulbright was that the commissions in Spain and Greece had seen my work and wanted to support it, that my goals were goals they shared. I believe in the Fulbright Program’s mission of intercultural understanding, and took my role as a cultural diplomat for the United States seriously, particularly given that our cultural ties are currently strained. Through giving readings of my translations and highlighting their influence on my own writing, I thought of myself as a kind of ambassador for Yiddish poetry and looked forward, in the future, to being a different sort of ambassador for Spain and Greece.
It has been a strange time for me. I spent a decade—the formative years of my life—homebound due to illness. Watching the rest of the world shift onto that wavelength has brought up a number of conflicting feelings. I’ll admit to being annoyed by people complaining about isolation, considering the prolonged isolation I have known, and the indifference of the world at the time. On the other hand, I am aware that my concerns about my time in Europe being cut short may also seem trivial to others, though I believed in the work I was doing. The severity of my illness has given me a sense of living on borrowed time, of knowing that being sick once only makes it more likely that I will be so in the future, and that adds to my frustrations during this pandemic. Of course, this personal reality also added to my fears leaving Europe. We all have underlying life experience that may be brought out in ways others don’t quite understand during this time.
I hope that in the coming months I can tap into some of the research I did in Spain. The photo is from Mallorca, which I visited at the beginning of February. Mallorca has a remarkable but also heartbreaking Jewish history, and was perhaps the place I most appreciated seeing.
The day I arrived, I made an interesting personal discovery that superficially had nothing to do with Mallorca, though it was related to my formation as a poet, and thus what had resulted in my being there. My first published poem was included in the longlist of the inaugural Montreal International Poetry Prize, released as an e-book in 2011. I had mixed feelings at the time. I have hesitations about the ethics of charging poets entry fees and am turned off by the way the contest system ranks poems based on the subjective taste of judges. I’m often not impressed by the poems that win. I suspect that judges may feel pressured to choose long epics. I was surprised that my poem placed at all, as it was short and lyrical. The poem was inspired by the years I spent homebound, and the gift that literature could be at the time. It was also inspired by the Yiddish legend of the paper bridge, which says that when the Messiah comes, the righteous will go to the promised land on a bridge made out of paper, while the wicked will go to gehenna on a bridge made out of iron.
I’m sure that the influence of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” was also there. I was stunned to learn, via a promotional email for this year’s Montreal Prize, that Leonard Cohen himself was the anonymous donor who had funded that first Montreal Poetry Prize and thus was responsible for my first publication as a poet. Suddenly, a publication I had felt uncertain about, and which I have considered removing from my CV (it was only the longlist after all) became one that is perhaps closest to my heart.
Sometimes the future holds surprises about the present.
I recently published two new Sutzkever translations.
The first, an elegy for Shloyme Mikhoels, the Soviet Yiddish actor murdered by Stalin, was published in The Arkansas International. This poem uses Mikhoels’ fate and King Lear, the role he was most closely associated with, to explore Sutzkever’s feelings about Zionism.
Read MoreTwo poems from my series on Jewish holidays were recently published by the Jewish Women’s Archive. Fittingly they were about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I’m writing this post just under the wire, clearly.
https://jwa.org/blog/high-holiday-poems
One poem from my series not included here was recently published in the North American Review. This one is from a series within the series on performances of Kol Nidrei. It feels personally fitting at the moment as I prepare to leave for Spain:
Kol Nidrei
May it be played by Casals,
my beloved Yom-Kippur-goy
of the cello. Perhaps he also
has vows to renounce,
an ancestor forced to convert
rather than burn, forebears
who wished to return.
He’s summoning them now
with his strings, with his bow,
grieving them now.
If you would like to listen to the recording, you can here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-pXTIUGQZA
And because I can’t resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIKmxTxpuE8
!גמר חתימה טובה
I recently received a travel fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. I will be attending their conference in Rochester and participating in a keynote reading on November 8th.
You can read about the fellowship and my translation work here:
The Greek Fulbright commission recently posted profiles of me and other 2019-2020 fellows. You can read mine here: https://www.fulbright.gr/en/grantees/us-grantees/profiles/1125-maia-evrona?fbclid=IwAR2ERTurmfg1iVRbutkxl1zxHHp6qCoxc265e3TDZZIdUA_AUr_nQFTBpd8
Pakn Treger recently published its annual online translation issue, which includes one of my Sutzkever translations: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/2019-pakn-treger-translation-issue?fbclid=IwAR2LypVH2ghzP6TyfNA8r7aw9xkfQ0K35UgmLlMb5Fog6aynl3BNb1ciqOM
That’s it for now!
On the 16th of June, I will be giving a reading of my translations at 5:30 pm at the Raye Freedman Library in Auckland, NZ.
In advance of this reading, I was interviewed on Auckland’s local Jewish radio program Radio Shalom. We spoke about Sutzkever and his reception in Israel, about the translation process, and about the process of writing poetry itself. You can listen here: https://www.planetaudio.org.nz/listen/radio-shalom/jewish-community-culture/507226?fbclid=IwAR3dznH8LXWghKg_Lsp8lVK23zAqRU_kpD0gb4x_C1P3JHU1Sdp7GG_alMM
A piece I wrote on the letters of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs was recently published by Poetry Northwest: https://www.poetrynw.org/with-what-words-with-what-silence/
Five of my poems were just featured in the the June issue of Europe Now: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/06/10/five-poems-by-maia-evrona/
Another poem was also published not long ago in the spring issue of North American Review, which can be purchased here: https://northamericanreview.org/issue/3042-spring-issue-2019
Meanwhile, new Sutzkever translations are due out soon in Pakn Treger and The Arkansas International.
I have a reading upcoming in Auckland, New Zealand on June 16th at the Raye Freedman Library. This was tacked on as an addition after my readings in Melbourne and Wellington, both of which were supported by my fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center.
I recently published a poem in the spring issue of the North American Review. Additional poems are forthcoming in June in Europe Now, along with some Sutzkever translations in The Arkansas International and Pakn Treger.
I recently received a translation fellowship for 2019 from the Yiddish Book Center. You can read the announcement here: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/translation-fellowship/translation-fellows
This fellowship is for a project I have been planning for a while: a selected edition of translations of the poet Yoysef Kerler. Kerler was an important post-war Soviet Yiddish poet, who served five years in the Vorkuta gulag for advocating the teaching of Yiddish. He was also one of the first prominent refuseniks. After his release from the gulag, it was impossible to publish poetry in Yiddish in the Soviet Union, so he often worked as a lyricist and published his work in Russian translation, and in journals abroad. (Sutzkever, in fact, published his work in Di Goldene Keyt.)
Two of my Kerler translations were published a few years ago by In Geveb: https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/old-fashioned-and-the-sea