Peretz Mark­ish was a lead­ing Sovi­et Yid­dish writer who, along with a num­ber of oth­er Yid­dish writ­ers, rev­o­lu­tion­ized Yid­dish poet­ry and cul­ture. Sad­ly, Mark­ish and some of those same inno­v­a­tive writ­ers were exe­cut­ed by Stal­in on August 12, 1952, a date that came to be known as ​“The Night of the Mur­dered Poets.”

Markish’s book-length poem, ​“Der Fert­siky­erik­er Man” (The Forty-Year-Old Man), com­posed of 80 sec­tions with pre­cise­ly 12 cou­plets in each, under­scores his mod­ernist aes­thet­ics and brash avant garde styl­is­tic tech­niques. It is an enig­mat­ic work, filled with aston­ish­ing, even grotesque, imagery. The poem’s focal point is an imag­ined Utopia fol­low­ing the dis­man­tling of the Tsarist autoc­ra­cy, though some of the sec­tions pri­mar­i­ly offer a cri­tique of social ills and injus­tices in both Europe and America. 

Very lit­tle schol­ar­ship exists on ​“Der Fert­siky­erik­er Man.” Even A Cap­tive of the Dawn, cur­rent­ly the defin­i­tive schol­ar­ly text on Peretz Mark­ish and his oeu­vre, offers no com­men­tary, gloss, or dis­cus­sion on this work. ^{1 1}A Cap­tive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Mark­ish (1895−1952), Ed. Joseph Sher­man, Gen­nady Estraikh, Jor­dan Finkin, and David Shneer (Lon­don: Leg­en­da, 2011). This is a sig­nif­i­cant lacu­na, espe­cial­ly when con­sid­er­ing that in her chap­ter in this very book, Chana Kro­n­feld writes that many schol­ars regard ​“Der Fert­siky­erik­er Man” as Markish’s masterpiece. ^{2 2} Chana Kro­n­feld, ​“Mur­dered Mod­ernisms: Peretz Mark­ish and the Lega­cy of Sovi­et Yid­dish Poet­ry”, in A Cap­tive of the Dawn. Ibid.

“Der Fert­siky­erik­er Man” has nev­er been trans­lat­ed to Eng­lish. Mark­ish him­self was afraid to pub­lish it while he was alive and man­aged to smug­gle it out of his house right before he was arrest­ed. In 1978, his wife and sons pub­lished the Yid­dish man­u­script, and his son, David Mark­ish, trans­lat­ed the poem to Russian.

To read ​“The Forty-Year-Old Man” is to expe­ri­ence an exer­cise in con­tra­dic­tions: the style is at once rad­i­cal and con­ven­tion­al, exper­i­men­tal yet con­tained. For exam­ple, Mark­ish inverts lin­guis­tic norms, often by trun­cat­ing words, so that they trans­mute into some­thing new, some­thing fab­ri­cat­ed. Or the word remains rec­og­niz­able, but its func­tion with­in the sen­tence is trans­formed, so that a verb may turn abrupt­ly into an adjec­tive, or a noun into an adverb – though the same word may switch back to its reg­u­lar func­tion in the next line or sec­tion, cre­at­ing a sort of invert­ed mir­ror effect. (Imag­ine the translator’s work!) All this is emblem­at­ic of Markish’s bold experimentalism. 

Yet one need only skim the pages of the poem to also notice its con­ser­v­a­tive bent. The poem is con­tained. Every sec­tion fea­tures the exact same num­ber of lines, and most of the lines rhyme. Although the rhyme can be slop­py (the words refuse to be as con­tained as they’re meant to be), the meter is pre­cise — the entire poem is in tetram­e­ter. Dar­ing as Mark­ish may have been, he was still cog­nizant of the con­ven­tions of the artis­tic milieu of which he was a part. Writ­ing in tetram­e­ter, with per­fect­ly spaced stan­zas, placed him with­in the accept­able para­me­ters of mod­ernist Yid­dish poet­ry of his time, which in turn allowed him the free­dom of exper­i­ment­ing with words, syn­tax, and imagery.

As a trans­la­tor, one of the chal­lenges I strug­gled with (and still am – the trans­la­tion of this book is a work in progress) was how to han­dle the rhyme and meter. Keep­ing them felt restric­tive to me, and — I thought — unnat­ur­al to the ears of the mod­ern read­er. Yet dis­card­ing them felt untrue to the poem’s music and, in a way, to Mark­ish him­self. At first, I tried keep­ing the rhyme, but I soon real­ized I was doing a dis­ser­vice to the poem. The rhyming made the lan­guage sound con­trived and not at all in keep­ing with Markish’s sen­si­bil­i­ties. Fur­ther­more, since Mark­ish him­self had been slop­py in his rhymes, I thought I might take more lib­er­ties with them myself. I decid­ed, there­fore, to aban­don my efforts at rhyme and instead use oth­er son­ic devices, such as allit­er­a­tion or asso­nance, to cre­ate the music in the poem.

The meter, though, was more dif­fi­cult to dis­card. It felt too delib­er­ate on Markish’s part, and essen­tial to the voice of the poem. And so, for the four sec­tions pre­sent­ed here at least, I’ve tried to retain a four-pulse beat, sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal Yiddish. 

I select­ed these four sec­tions out of the total of 80 because I liked the jux­ta­po­si­tion of a pair cri­tiquing social ills (Sec­tions 13 and 17) with a pair that seems to epit­o­mize Markish’s utopi­an vision (Sec­tions 36 and 37). In Sec­tion 37, espe­cial­ly, Markish’s roman­tic vision reach­es new heights. He imag­ines a recre­ation of Rus­sia not only as a polit­i­cal renew­al, but also as a phys­i­cal one. Like the anthro­po­mor­phic golem of legend, ^{3 3} Mark­ish was inter­est­ed in the golem motif. See Har­ri­et Murav, ​“Peretz Mark­ish in the 1930s: Social­ist Con­struc­tion and the Return of the Luft­mensh” in A Cap­tive of the Dawn for a won­der­ful dis­cus­sion on this top­ic. See also my trans­la­tion of Sec­tion 5 of Der Fert­siky­erik­er Man pub­lished in Cir­cum­fer­ence: Poet­ry in Trans­la­tion, and my expla­na­tion of the phrase ​“an aleph in the mouth” in the intro­duc­tion. earth becomes a live being. A new heart is being fash­ioned for it, and though ​“earth is still bare­foot,” still in its infan­cy — though its peo­ple are still suf­fer­ing birthing pains — ​“all’s fine and good.” After all, this is the begin­ning of good times. ​“From bor­der to bor­der,” a per­fect coun­try, a per­fect world, awaits. 

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