STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
lOS
I return later to this question, but a few words about it now. Recently,
when then-Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky announced his project
to
record (in anticipation of the new millennium) the favorite poems writ–
ten in the last hundred years of hundreds, if not thousands, of Ameri–
cans, he declared, in an interview in the
New York Times,
that his own
personal favorite was Saul Bellow's Yiddish translation of T. S. Eliot's
"The Love Song of
J.
Alfred Prufrock." This loose, ironic translation–
more, in truth, an exercise in cultural transmutation-is truly wonder–
ful. The text of it has never been published in full, but here is a sample
in both Yiddish and English translation. First, Eliot's poem in its
original form:
Let us go, then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats....
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
Nu-zhe, kum-she, ikh un du
Ven der ovnt shteyt unter dem himl
Vi a leymener goylem oyf tishebov.
Vi di bord bay dem rov....
Lomir oyfefnen di tiro
In tsimer ve di vayber senen
Redt men fun Karl Marx un Lenin
Nu, let us go, you and I
When the evening stands beneath the sky
Like a clay golem on Tisha b'Av
Let us go, through streets that twist
Like a rabbi's beard ....
Let me open the door
in the room where the wives are
talking of Marx and Lenin.
"A startling x ray of [Eliot's] hallowed bones, which brings Anglo–
Saxons and Jews together in a surrealistic Yiddish unity, a masterpiece
of irreverence." These last words are, indeed, Bellow commenting, as it
happens, on the Prufrock translation produced not by him, as Bellow
has always acknowledged, but by his dear friend Isaac Rosenfeld. So, the
poem designated, albeit tentatively, by the former U.S . Poet Laureate as
