Bialik in translation: Peter Cole and the politics of poetic memory
This new translation of Bialik reveals how poetry confronts violence, faith, and politics — while speaking to India’s own struggles with translation and cultural memory
The New York Review of Books has once again performed a quiet act of resistance — by publishing revised translations of the Hebrew poet HN Bialik, rendered by poet and translator Peter Cole. In a time when poetry is too often co-opted into political sloganism, this collection invites a more nuanced engagement with the poetic tradition and its fraught legacies.
While translations from Indian languages have gained more visibility in recent years — with Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize recognition and writers such as Jerry Pinto building an impressive record in the field — major undertakings by internationally renowned publishers remain largely out of reach. One also wonders about the outcomes of the Ministry of Culture’s Indian Literature Abroad project. In such a landscape of struggles, a benchmark discussion such as this review becomes especially relevant, offering insight into the art of translation itself.
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), born in Russian Ukraine, lived in a tumultuous age of pogroms, exile, and spiritual reckoning. He wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, navigating between theological introspection and public lament. That over a hundred thousand people attended his funeral in 1934 attests to his place in Jewish collective consciousness — not just as a poet, but as a cultural force.
Peter Cole, himself a poet and Hebrew literature scholar, approaches Bialik with reverence but not reverential distance. His translations do not merely bring Bialik into English — they interrogate how a poem travels across languages, epochs, and ideological terrains. As the meaning of duality not lost on the Indians abroad, Bialik also writes in his 1927 essay: “There are transmigrations in language: many souls pass through, one after another, each leaving its spirit in the word.” Jew, Israeli, and Ukrainian, he remained a Russian poet in his poetics.
This is not Cole’s first encounter with the politics of translation. In a 2014 essay for The Paris Review, he observed: “Political poems lead strange lives — they often wither on the vines of the events they’re tied to.” Yet, they also erupt unexpectedly into relevance. One such moment came when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked Bialik’s lines — “Vengeance… for the blood of a small child, / Satan has not yet created.” The poem, written in the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, was transposed into a modern political arena as justification. Cole challenges this appropriation directly: “The poem intoned by Mr Netanyahu wasn’t Israeli: it was written long before the state was founded and very far from it.” Almost everyone in public life is guilty of quoting some old text without knowing its real and original context. Some reflective lines may be fine, but politics is always loaded with dangers. How far should political poems go into the current contested partisan context?
Such misreadings aren’t rare. The translator must thus act both as medium and mediator. In her introduction to the NYRB’s Rumi (2022), Haleh Liza Gafori compared her translation with those of Coleman Barks and Asberry. Her version — “Whatever the ways of the world,/what fruits do you bring?” — offers an alternative to Arberry’s “Whatever comes of the world’s affairs,/ how does that affect your business?” The shift is not lexical but philosophical. Translation becomes commentary.
Cole’s rendering of Bialik’s On the Slaughter is illustrative:
Skies — have mercy. If you hold a God (to whom there’s a way that I haven’t found), pray for me.
Compare this to Ruth Nevo’s earlier version:
Heaven, beg mercy for me! If there is a God in you, a pathway through you to this God — which I have not discovered — then pray for me!
Cole’s spareness lets the emotional force rise unencumbered. The em dash becomes a theological rupture, not a mere typographic choice.
And yet, Bialik is more than just a poet of lament. The collection includes gentler pieces like Flowers to a Butterfly and The Potted Flower, where the poet’s mystical sensibility, perhaps influenced by Kabbalistic motifs, emerges:
from the still the potted flower all day long looks out over
toward his friends in the garden beds while here he standsalone instead.
These poems, while less anthologised, add dimension to Bialik’s legacy. They remind us that he was not only a witness to atrocity but also a dreamer of fragile beauty embedded in Russian romanticism.
His most famous poem, City of Slaughter, was written not as reportage but in lieu of it. Commissioned to investigate the Kishinev massacre, Bialik returned with verse, not facts. Historian Alan Mintz has remarked on the cracks between the eyewitness account and the politically motivated poetic rendering, noting the latter’s mythic tone.
This mytho-theological framework has parallels with other poets writing in pogroms. Zuzanna Ginczanka’s Non omnis moriar, written before her execution in Nazi-occupied Kraków, lacks Bialik’s ruthless imagery but offers its own chilling resignation. Where Bialik thunders, “the dried blood and softened tissue spilled from skulls of the fallen...” with fallen deity, deeply wounded, searching for moral reckoning, Ginczanka excels in love and refrain.
In this context, Cole’s translations become even more vital. They resist both hagiography and utilitarianism. They remind us that poetry is not a weapon to be aimed, but a world to be entered with humility however harrowing. As Nissim Ezekiel once observed, “Poetry, if it is at all true, is never a weapon but a form of truth-telling.” In an India where political discourse often overwhelms nuance, that reminder is urgent. Bialik’s legacy speaks to the cost of violence and the necessity of reflection, and Cole’s translations succeed not in simplifying him, but in expanding the space in which we can meet him — a space as necessary for Indian readers as for any others.
Yogesh Patel has received an MBE for literature from the late Queen of England and holds the honour of the Freedom of the City of London. His last collection of poems, The Rapids, is published by The London Magazine. He is an award-winning poet. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
