The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization is a ten-volume series that collects more than 3,000 years of Jewish cultural artificats, texts, and paintings, selected by more than 120 internationally recognized scholars.
“I value clarity—an old-fashioned virtue,” the poet and translator Chana Bloch once told a reporter. Bloch, who died last month at 77, might have named another virtue—modesty—to her personal canon; it was one she possessed and exemplified in her work, which ranged widely over topics including womanhood, Judaism, the end of a marriage that was good until it wasn’t, and serious depression.
One of the short but memorable poems in her 1981 collection, The Secrets of the Tribe, was included in Volume 10 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. “The Converts” takes place on an interminable Yom Kippur afternoon when the mind wanders and dinner seems months away. It summons a common experience, yet also, in its casual way, goes deeper, showing how kinship and difference can coexist. In the poem, the narrator eyes a group of very solemn converts, six beards and shawls, a pious cluster. They don’t seem hungry or distracted. They love praying. “If they go on loving that way, we’ll be here all night,” the narrator muses, but finds herself puzzled and beguiled by their piety. The last stanza ends with a clear and arresting image—
The converts sway in white silk,
their necks bent forward in yearning
like swans,
and then pulls off a marvelous trick, inhabiting two consciousnesses at once—
and I covet
what they think we’ve got.
The last twist, a perfect, and perfectly unexpected, ending, was typical of Bloch’s poetry, with insight, sympathy, irony, and humor all mixing into a single, strange, powerful elixir. Of course, Bloch had less control over the poems she translated, yet that work—also included in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization—was no less virtuosic. Translators need be modest—it is the sine qua non of their craft—and Bloch achieved both fealty and lucidity, the benchmark for good translation.
