Translations for Abba Kovner

Rarely translated into English, the poetry of Abba Kovner (1918-1987) is historically vital as witness and, when viewed in its entirety, a poetry of long term trauma that recurs long after the victim is safe from harm. Kovner, author of the first manifesto naming the Nazi’s intent to eliminate world Jewry, called for armed rebellion, led the uprising in the Vilna Ghetto, escaped to the forest where he was a partisan until the end of the war. He then made his way to British Mandate Palestine where he established Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh and later testified in the Eichmann trial. Kovner’s life and experience is representative of the experiences of so many during WWII. But beyond the historical aspects of his poetry, we can suss out so many important attributes. There is much to learn about racism, about both the cruelty and the kindness of mankind. Today, not only with Israel’s devastation of the Palestinian people, but also the war in the Ukraine, poetry that exemplifies the experience of a people vilified, repressed, even exterminated is vitally important. This project is important to English readers everywhere, many of whom will have access for the first time to the full and complete oeuvre of this beautiful poet. 

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While on tour in the USA in 1972 Abba Kovner told his audience: “When I write I am like a man praying.” Yet, he said, in the liturgy, “a man should not say his own prayer before the prayer of his community…But the community in which I..say my poems is half alive and half dead. Who are living and who are dead? I don’t know how to answer this question. But I believe there is one place in the world without cemeteries. This is the place of poetry.”
 

Kovner never left the dead behind. They fill his poems, ghostly voices, their presence floating through the lines: his mother, his beloved and the hundred thousand murdered in the killing grounds of Ponar. Family and friends fallen in the Vilna ghetto. His partisan comrades from the forests where he fought rising out of a kibbutz shower drain. These ghosts have appeared to tell their stories. The poet is only a witness.

Poetry of witness, writes Carolyn Forche, is “a plea against despair..not a cry for sympathy, but a call for strength.” It is now that the poetry of witness becomes ever more important. Kovner’s poetry is almost unknown in English. I took on the translation of his poems in order to carry his witness out into a global language so we might remember: in man’s inhumanity to man there are no winners. Only ghosts.