Mar 03, 2025
Abraham Sutzkever: Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner, with an Afterword by Justin Cammy. Naydus Press: 2024: 157 pages. $15.00
Thanks to Mel Konner’s 2024 translation Elephants by Night, Abraham Sutzkever’s free verse African poems come to life in their new and elegant English renditions. The at times fantastical poems of the cycle take on an array of themes such as love, sexuality, the cycle of life and death, oppression, and resistance.
The poems let us delve into these experiences through the eyes of large and small creatures: dignified elephants “striding” towards their place of rest, the ever-growing hubris of gluttonous “chewing” locusts, or the nonchalance of golden birds that carry a fallen, beautiful “Bantu man” to a wedding. Mystical landscapes and extraordinary animals are not the only inhabitants of the world of Elephants by Night. It is also populated by kings, hunters, maidens and men, as well as the dejected, loners, and travelers.
For Sutzkever aficionados, the cycle is an intriguing read because the poems’ metaphors, images, and stories are couched in an unexpected landscape: South African savannas, forests, and coasts. Konner’s new translation gives readers the opportunity to engage with these symbolistic and mythic poems that explore eternal human questions and experiences. Moreover, Justin Cammy’s well researched and insightful afterword lays the groundwork for possible interpretations and contextualizes the cycle within Sutzkever’s oeuvre and as a survivor and poetic witness of the Shoah.
Sutzkever wrote the Elephants by Night cycle after the course of his four-month trip to Jewish communities in South Africa in 1950, where he also visited places that are now part of Zimbabwe and Namibia.
1
1
Cf. Justin Cammy, “Afterword”, Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 129.
Only four years prior, Sutzkever had testified for Eastern European Jewry against the German Nazi planners and perpetrators of the Shoah at the Nuremberg trials.
With appearances and talks throughout his trip, Sutzkever strove to raise money for the establishment of the Vilna Cultural House in his new home of Tel Aviv. 2 2 Cf. Justin Cammy, “Afterword”, Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 125. A few lone poems were published in Der yidisher kemfer and Di goldene keyt from 1952 until 1955. 3 3 Cf. Justin Cammy, “Afterword”, Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 136. The cycle was published in its entirety in 1955 within the anthology Ode tsu der toyb (1955), together with the prose stories Griner akvaryum and the titular long poem Ode tsu der toyb. Despite the beauty of the cycle and its interesting placement within the anthology, 4 4 In the afterword, Cammy gives an explanation as to why he thinks they were published together in Ode tsu der toyb. it has not drawn much scholarly attention.
Konner’s new translation of Elephants by Night, published by Naydus Press, aligns with growing interest in Abraham Sutzkever’s works. There have recently been many new Sutzkever translations making the Yiddish writer more accessible to his English-speaking readership. The most recent translations have been focused on Sutzkever’s life-writings and prose: Justin Cammy’s edition From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony (2021) and Zackary Sholem Berger’s Sutzkever Essential Prose (2020). The most recent translation of Sutzkever’s poetry, The Full Pomegranate (2019) by Richard J. Fein, takes the readers non-chronologically along Sutzkever’s entire poetic career, ranging from poems first published in 1936 to those published in 1996.
Since the last translation of the cycle by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (A. Sutzkever: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1991) was published decades ago, a new, readily available and modern translation of Helfandn bay Nakht has been long overdue. Surprisingly, the existence of the previous translation is not mentioned in either the Fore- or Afterword of the new translation. Such an omission disregards the past contribution and obscures the history of the cycle’s reception.
The Harshavs’ translation Elephants at Night incorporates only 22 poems of the overall 42 poems of the original Helfandn bay Nakht. Konner translates and adds two later poetic reflections of Sutzkever’s trip to South Africa to his rendition of the cycle. This makes Konner’s Elephants by Night the first complete English translation of Sutzkever’s cycle. Thus, the volume is in itself a valuable contribution to the study of Sutzkever’s poetic oeuvre which is heightened by virtue of the translations’ reputable quality.
Elephants by Night showcases the Yiddish original and Konner’s English renditions side by side, offering opportunities for readers to compare the translations to the original for a closer reading experience. The volume is significant not only for its modern, bilingual translations but also because, to my knowledge, Cammy’s afterword relays the first interpretations of the poems in the English language. There are some discussions of the cycle in Yiddish journals and papers; however, they are not digitized and are hard to come by. 5 5 See A. Durka Geyer, “Sutzkever un Afrike”, Afrikaner yidishe tsaytung, October 21, 1995: 13; Yitskhok Varshavski, “A nay bukh fun A. Sutzkever”, Forverts, December 25, 1955: 15; Melekh Ravitsh, Mayn leksikon, vol. 3 (Montreal: n.p., 1958): 291; A. Leyeles, “Velt un vort: A. Sutzkever’s nay bukh”, Der tog (New York), November 19, 1955: 5; Yankev Glatshteyn, “In tokh fun genumen: Ode tsu der toyb fun A. Sutzkever”, Yidisher kemfer, December 16, 1955: 15. These sources are cited in Cammy’s Afterward. The appendixed Notes by Cammy and Konner lends readers a helping hand, explicating poetic images and providing information about the origin of some of the referenced names, or reworked folklore. 6 6 For example, they note that tigers appear in the cycle, although this animal is not native to Africa and call attention to the fact that “The Bride of Thunder” reworks a known African folkloric tale.
It is fitting that Konner, professor of Anthropology, Behavioral Biology and Neuroscience at Emory University, translated this cycle, seeing as he was a traveler in the South of Africa himself: In his early career, Konner studied infancy among Kalahari hunter-gatherers in the Namibian desert. Konner is an author of several monographs in his research fields and on Jewish topics, as well as a playwright.
Konner does not attempt to emulate Sutzkever’s rhyme and meter. For the poems that do contain rhymes, this is regrettable, as some layers of meaning and joy of the original are obscured for lack of attention to these aspects. Yet, Konner’s translations are well-crafted, capturing the essence of the poems with his semantic choices or syntactic changes. While there are some incomprehensible decisions and unfavorable choices, all in all, Konner presents readers with clever and sensuous renditions of the Yiddish originals. It is important to note that these translations also update the language of the poems: contrary to the Harshavs’ translations, these versions do not reproduce derogatory wordings. The Harshavs’ versions often (not always!) follow the originals more closely. Thus, for readers, a comparative glance at both translations would be worthwhile.
To explicate some of the claims I have made about Konner’s translation, take, for example, the poem “Tears of Vengeance” (which is not included in the Harshavs’ anthology), found on pages 76-77 of Elephants by Night:
נקמה־טרערן
אַזוי װי קאָרן איז דאָס ברויט פֿאַר מענטשן,
זענען מענטשן ברויט פֿאַר די דעמאָנען.
זיי אַקערן מיט אונדזערע סקעלעטן און פֿאַרזייען,
װי אַ הואיפן זינגעדיקע שטויב די מענטשן־קערנער.
פֿלייצנדיקע הענט פֿון רעגן
ציען אונדז אַרויס...
נאָר קוים באַװײַזן מיר צו זאַגן׃ מאַמע
אַ לעק צו טאָן דעם האָניק פֿון די שאָטנס,
איידער נאָך מיר װייסן װואָס צו מאָנען—
זענען מיר שוין ברויט פֿאַר די דעמאָנען.
דעריבער זענען פֿול און צײַטיק
די נקמה־טרערן.
נקמה־טרערן שפּריצן װי די פֿונקען בײַ אַ לייבין,
װאָס געפינט ניט מער אין הייל
די לייבעלעך
די קינדער.
נקמה־טרערן פֿינקלען איבער מײַלן,
מיט זייער סם באַגילדן מיר די פֿײַלן
און די פֿײַלן שיקן מיר אַװעק צו יענע טראָנען,
װוּ מיר זענען ברויט פֿאַר די דעמאָנען.
Tears of Vengeance
As grain is bread for men,
So men are bread for demons.
They plow with our skeletons and sow
Human seeds like a handful of singing dust.
The tidal hands of rain
Pull us away …
I scarcely manage to say: Mother,
to lick the honey of the shadows,
Before we know what to ask—
We are already bread for demons.
Then full and ripe
Are the tears of vengeance.
Tears of vengeance spray like sparks, as if a lioness
Returned to her cave to find her cubs,
Her children,
Gone.
Tears of vengeance sparkle for miles,
We gild our arrows with their poison,
And send them off to the thrones
Where we are bread for demons.
The poem speaks, amongst other things, of powerlessness and the righteousness of revenge. The simile “azoy vi / vi” at the beginning of the poem suggests that the hierarchy of “hunters” and “hunted” is part of nature: a former hunter becomes the hunted, and vice versa. Just as the humans use grain (bread’s “babies”) to nourish themselves, so do the demons plow “human seeds.” (So who can blame the demons, really?)
In Konner’s translation the simile is weakened, since he does not repeat the “as,” but opts for “like” in the second stanza. Also, he chooses “human seed” instead of “human grain,” not using “grain” twice, as Sutzkever does with “korn/kerner.” This translation decision favors the subsequent image of sowing fields over the simile and simultaneously evokes the meaning behind the metaphor of “mentshn-kerner”.
Konner’s interpretation of the second verse of the second stanza is one strong possibility. In his translation, however, the wordplay of the second verse of the second stanza is lost. The original repeats the semantic field of the first stanza with the neologism “mentshn-kerner” and thus reminds the reader of the simile of the first stanza with its sense of “in nature, we are part of the same cycle.” By foregoing this repetition, Konner focuses on another meaning present in the first three stanzas. This meaning is brought to the forefront most explicitly by the word “skeletons.”
With “skeletn” and “hoyfn,” associations to images of the Shoah arise. Konner doubles down on this with “The tidal hands of rain / pull us away”. The anthropomorphized rain washes the seeds, a generation of men, away. One could argue that translating “fleytsndike” not as “rushing” or “surging,” but as “tidal,” introduces a symbolic layer to this poem that is not present in Sutzkever’s verse. Yet in Yiddish literature, the Shoah is often represented as a catastrophic flood. By translating “fleytsndike” as “tidal,” Konner chose to emphasize this historical context and the meaning present in “hoifn” and “skeletn” in an emphatic way.
In the fifth stanza, the loss of a generation and the anger it provokes is likened to a lioness losing her cubs. In his rendition, Konner emphasizes the devastating moment of experiencing loss: “Returned to her cave to find her cubs, / Her children, / Gone”, whereas Sutzkever’s stresses the loss of the children, deconstructing the metaphor with the last verse: “vos gefint nit mer in heyl / di leyvelekh / di kinder.”
To return to the question of blame: At the end of the poem, it seems that the narrator deems that humans and demons are not alike, and that the hierarchy is something that can be destroyed, not like in the animal kingdom. For the men end up “gild[ing] our arrows with their poison, / And send them off to those thrones / Where we are bread for demons.” 7 7 As a side note, the motif of poisoned arrows is also celebrated in the poem “Song of the Lepers”. Unfortunately, the rhyme of the last stanza “mayln / fayln / tronen /demonen,” which gives this act of vengeance a celebratory movement, is not reproduced in the translation. Yet, overall, Konner’s translation of Tears of Vengeance is an example of his eye for detail, interpretive accomplishment, and depth.
The majority of the poems in the cycle are set in unidentified places, “in the wild” in a seemingly prehistoric “Africa.” Justin Cammy is quick to comment in the Afterword that one would be remiss to read Sutzkever’s cycle merely through the eyes of postcolonial theory. 8 8 Cf. Justin Cammy, “Afterword”, Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 132f. While this is certainly true and there are other productive analytical perspectives to take on, an admission to the Othering image of Africa, which the cycle elicits, is nevertheless wanting.
In the Afterword, Cammy generally problematizes the Othering and dehumanizing stereotypes that Western travel literature has procured. Even though Sutzkever’s subtitle of the cycle, A Trip through Africa, is a nod to this travel literature, Cammy argues that Sutzkever’s cycle does not partake in the travel literature’s project. According to him, Sutzkever writes from the position of the marginalized Other on the European continent of his time: the Jew. 9 9 Cf. Justin Cammy, “Afterword”, Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 133. Cammy (and Konner) stress that Sutzkever engages with the places and people he encounters with sympathy and respect: recognizing people’s historic oppression, and being inspired by the culture and stories of the people. To Cammy, the old continent reappears within this cycle through themes of violence and resistance, thus laying a significant path of how to interpret the poems vis-à-vis Sutzkever’s life and oeuvre as a survivor. Nevertheless, it is indeed possible to read this poetry as empathetic while at the same time participating in a discourse of exoticizing the Other; these are not mutually exclusive concepts. Given the significant research in recent years of Yiddish writing that reproduces racializing tropes (some of which has appeared in In geveb), 10 10 See Marc Caplan, “Yiddish Exceptionalism: Lynching, Race, and Racism in Opatoshu’s “Lintsheray”.” In geveb (June 2016): https://ingeveb.org/articles/yiddish-exceptionalism-lynching-race-and-racism-in-opatoshus-lintsheray; Jacob Morrow-Spitzer, “Race Uprooted: Foreign Observation, American Racism, and Yiddish Journalism through I.J. Singer’s 1932 “Harlem Cabaret”.” In geveb (May 2024): https://ingeveb.org/blog/race-uprooted a more nuanced and less defensive stance would have been productive.
Specks of horrific personal tragedies and the collective persecution of Jews in the Second World War are indeed mirrored in some poems. For example, “Tears of Vengeance” is evocative of the theme in “For my child” (1943). The cycle seems to hover in between Sutzkever’s prewar and war-time stance towards poetry’s role in society: it experiments with new forms and at times abstractly broaches the issue of historic and contemporary injustices. Poems such as “Diamond Girl” tell of the exploitation of people and the looting of the lands’ resources. “Herero Suicide Song” tackles the same theme. “The Bird-Ship” speaks of the oppression of Africans into slave trade by Arab spice traders in Zanzibar.
Finally, the exuberance of the cycle should be noted, as not all poems in Elephants by Night are as dark as “Tears of Vengeance”. There are so many gems to be discovered, a few of which I wish to mention here. The poem “Pygmy-Dance” shows the people that the narrator refers to a Pygmy (using what was then common terminology) 11 11 Today, the ethnic groups of the Congo basin with unusually short stature, once referred to as Pygmys, are described according to their autochthonous names. “Dancing out: revenge against the tall!” 12 12 Abraham Sutzkever, Elephants by Night. African Poems. Trans. Mel Konner (Cincinnati: Naydus Press, 2024): 13. with bloody knives in the Saharan moonlight. In “The Dream” a lone(ly) man meditates on the insidious nature of dreams; meanwhile, the heretic locusts in “The Locust” inspire fear in stars with their all-devouring, never-ending chewing.
A few of the many poems on themes of love and conquest should also be mentioned. The lamentations of a heartbroken widow in “Dirge of a Young-Widow” and the self-catechizing husband in “Love-Song” inspire compassion. The weeping, love-sick thunder in “Bride of Thunder” is reminiscent of Othello. In “The River is Full Today” the ever-present obstacle in love stories is embodied by a river of crocodiles separating lovers. Lastly, the fever-dream of the self-made Moses in “At the Nile” deserves a spotlight.
Mel Konner’s wonderful translation fills a wanted gap in the work of translating Sutzkever’s poetic oeuvre. It allows English readers, interested in exploring this lesser-known cycle, to enjoy the mythic world of Elephants by Night. For scholars the cycle can be of great interest, since in it many stones of poetic richness and intertextual play still lie unturned.
