102
PARTISAN REVIEW
was at the peak of his fame at the tinie ; wRich is to say much es–
teemed and much challenged; I was a y8ung woman and still
beautiful, a cause for much envy on the part of those who knew our
secret. His feelings of guilt, the constant gnawings of his conscience,
died down at last. During our years together, a "time of cruelty and
tenderness," M.O. did his best work. (As for his biblical dramas,
you must not forget, sir, that they contain dangerous allusions of the
sort which, even if consigned to the drawer, could in those "wolfish
times" expose an author to mortal danger. Reading Miss Nina Roth–
Swanson's commentaries - I'm sorry, but I seem to keep bumping
intO her as if she were a wardrobe planted in the middle of a
room - and her interpretation of Moses
as
the personification of
"r~pressed
hatred for the rabbi-
~nd
tyrant-father," I wonder
whether Nina R.-S. did not dream her way through the years she
spent in Russia "beneath the cruel §kies of dear old Moses," when in–
stead of practicing "in-depth analY§is" she Was a modest translator
and lecturer.) I personally typed at cepied out all Mendel
Osipovich's works; I was , sir, the midwife
ts
his
litefary
labors (see,
for example, the poem "She said:
'Ani~i("
Vol. II,
p.
94).
For years
I kept a suitcase packed, ready to leave at
a
word frdffi him. I spent
"glorious nights of feral fever" in provincial fleabags and rented
rooms. I remember-if I have the right to remember-the excite–
ment we felt at our first merging in a Baku hotel: our clothes hung
together in the wardrobe in lascivious intimacy. (I shall refrain from
commenting
011
the interpretation Roth-Swanson gives the poem
"Merging Skins," overstepping, as it does, the bounds of decency
and common sense.)
You may ask , sir, what all this has to do with Mendel Osi–
povich's oeuvre. Well, sir, I atn the Polyhymnia in the poem of that
name (and its significance becomes clear only in the context of our
experience). "In my every line, my every word, my every full stop I
feel your presence like a drop of pollen," M.O. used to say.
"Everything I have written, even everything I have translated, bears
your mark." He translated the
Song of Songs
in 1928; that is, at a time
when the rifts between us belonged to the past. (Zanikovsky's con–
tention that the translation is
"inacc~rate"
is ridiculous! The liber–
ties M .O. took are justified by his own personal theory; there is no
reason for Zanikovsky to bring in M.O.'s father, "the highly re–
garded Yosef ben Bergelson," and lay the blame on him. M.O. in–
corporated his own, personal experiences into translations. "How
