Poetry of Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne

Alter, Robert

Poetry of Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne introduction and translation by Robert Alter Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne was born in Galicia in 1883, spent his most active years as a Zionist organizer, Hebrew...

...Listen: the sound of mighty breakers in the forest The earth and the fullness thereof is called forth...
...The world has stripped its soul To the Lord in the storm...
...REACCESS presents classics from the Jewish past...
...Day unto day will bear a burning sun And night after night will spill stars On the lips of the lonely, song stops: By seven ways we part and by one we return...
...Apples glow in silence on your table The bounty of golden grapes flows over the basket's rim And blessing gives off its ripe fragrance...
...You and I — And over us The sound of seas...
...The forest thunders and roars And its song is sweet From the still Of your precious nook...
...Another thirteen poems were discovered in manuscript after his death...
...The Lonely Say Day unto day will bequeath a guttering sun And night over night will lament Summer after summer gone into leaf-fall The world in its sorrow exults...
...Tomorrow we die reft of speech As we leave we stand at the closing gate And the heart God gladdened with nearness Will regret — and tremble for fear of betrayal...
...The role Sonne has played in Hebrew poetry is a strange, haunting one...
...He has written widely, and his books include AFTER THE TRADITION, a study of modern Jewish literature...
...A vraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne translated by Robert Alter...
...His style is at once chastely precise and sumptuously allusive...
...During his lifetime, he allowed only twelve poems to be published, only one of these after 1915...
...Poetry of Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne introduction and translation by Robert Alter Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne was born in Galicia in 1883, spent his most active years as a Zionist organizer, Hebrew educator and litterateur in Vienna until the Nazi take-over in 1938, then settled in Jerusalem where he lived until shortly before his death in a sanitarium outside Tel Aviv in 1950...
...I did not know my soul And my soul took its fill of silence...
...You are the blessing You are repose — The storm screams to my soul...
...Look: the wings of my spirit tremble The forest thunders and roars The wind pounds with its breakers O on me rests your tremulous gaze...
...This month's contributor is Robert Alter, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whose last appearance in MOMENT was in May/June, 1975...
...We are hidden Like two pearls In their shells On the floor of the sea...
...Yet this miniscule production has made him one of the important figures in 20th century Hebrew verse...
...Here the Psalmist's wordless discourse of the skies is adopted to express Sonne's central theme — the silence that transcends poetry, the oneness of death beyond the anguished brokenness of life here-and-now...
...His poetry, and the peculiar asceticism of his literary career, embodied an ideal of formal perfection in language radically different from the lyric effusiveness prevalent among his Hebrew predecessors and contemporaries...
...I Did Not Know My Soul Vintage time and these skies rich with movement, Earth radiates light from within And gull-gaunt clouds wide-winged Are swept far away in the storm — Then your lonely house glimmers doubly pale Out of the greenish black of the forest And calls me then with its windows: In my heart there is refuge From the storm.' And when you sit like this by the fire And its gold plays On this chestnut head of yours bent down And in the mirror of your black silk dress The flame's brightness dances...
...The first of the two poems builds upon — is virtually a midrash of —the great Psalm 19: "The heavens tell the glory of God, and His handiwork the firmament declares...
...In the second of the two poems offered here, the sensuous evocation of a moment of passion is immensely enriched by the key echoes from Psalm 98, in which the sea thunders the glory of the Lord who has come to judge the earth...

Vol. 1 • December 1975 • No. 5


 
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