Mikhl Likht: An Excerpt from “Procession Seven”

Translation from Yiddish by Merle Bachman

“What would be the use of a procession ... if people had
all to lie down on their faces so that they couldn’t see it?”
.....................— Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

............................................[lines to B. S.]
1

(Play in 41 scenes. Frosty afternoon. Theater: unartist-
ic origin............Mobile dream.........Crossroads.........Fulfillment.
Rienzi Overture; Gretry: Cephale et Pro-cris; Debussy; Printemps, suite.
Redeem: The Greenhorn Cousin, Father of Compassion, Bridal March—
Eastside Orchestra on Victor Records.....
Wet eyelashes.....Motheryearning.........Thus: days, nights, until, from)

.............Concealed from you, the wrathful power
.............that submerges itself in your artless ways.

.............Your hands like August-corn-ear
............ prayerfully balanced in a passionate wind.
.............I the one elected “caretaker”
.............pay a tithe for the full contents.

.............Your gift to me shall not remain thankless.

2

(Undiagnosed paralysis. Heartblind. Eros and Psyche, New Yorked version.
Nineteen-twenty-threed. Black tapes around a dramatic script.
Greeting from land to land. Boisterous queue: “Czar Feodor” horshoed around in “Cherry Garden.” Long stroll from there to there. Accidental chill.
Communication courageless sought. Another one, sought after. Courageous
still-silentness. We read Goethe’s Divan-Poems. Assonance achieves dis.)
............Remaining for me from a basket of “Queen Anne’s Lace”
............t h i s cool evening,
............t h a t glowing t u r n in daytime,
............the spill of curled-up leaflets at the bride’s feet
............on a day when innocence bubbles
............into bold ripeness. I seek a correction
............in the abundant warmth spurring you on toward
............man-defender, child-consolation.
............Retrospective evenings end
............cycles of brightshining confusion.

3

(dzin-dzin. Timeclock signal: deathfall. Passus from Egyptian darkness. A
gull deluges two mountains. A seagull—two continents. A lust-
gull—two climaxes. Sheer flooding in nothing. Despair
John Milton: “Take away then, my tortures. Nay. Take them not away!...
Loving is such sweet wretchedness!”)
............In the risky contest of our muteness
............falls the adversary, our erstwhile
............strangeness. The gossipy sea that flows
............in our friends’ astonished shrugs
............bears on its waves
............the pieces of our boat’s ribs.
............The boat had sailed in a rush
............in a gloomy whirl from your not-understanding
............the dreams’ meaning communicated to us both.

............Fleeting notes from a farewell
............over your sinful gift to me.

[Found in Gezalmete Lider, edited by N. B. Minkov and published in Buenos Aires, 1957. Note: I’ve italicized words that appear in English, in the original. (M.B.)]

COMMENTARY

What emerges in Likht’s work from 1923, as Bachman delivers it to us in English, is an extraordinarily complex & experimental poetry & poetics, far more radical in structure & content than all but a handful of his American counterparts & near contemporaries [Pound, Zukofsky, Williams, Cummings] & to some degree predating most of them. It is a confirmation as well of Kenneth Rexroth’s observation of a Yiddish avant-garde & futurist presence in his own early years in New York: “A good case could be made for the claim that the best writing done in America in the first quarter of the [twentieth] century was in Yiddish. I don’t think it’s really true, but it is sufficiently true to be passionately arguable in one of those passionate arguments that used to sprinkle the whiskers with sour cream in the Café Royale.” In Likht’s case, however, the aptness of Rexroth’s original appraisal, often repeated in conversation, seems remarkably & strikingly on target.

Writes Bachman in a brief summary of Likht’s life & career: “Mikhl Likht was an avant-garde Yiddish poet in New York in the 1920s and ’30s (although he kept writing until his death at the age of sixty in 1953). Born in a Ukrainian village in 1893, he came over to the U.S. in 1913, where he eventually participated in the short-lived movement of American Yiddish modernist poetry associated with the ‘In zikh' group (meaning ‘within one’s self; introspective’). Likht was both lauded and scorned by his Yiddish contemporaries for the ways in which he dared to leap over the heads of his Yiddish audience by embracing a highly idiosyncratic and often obscure vision in his poetry. However, he is a potential figure of great interest for poets and scholars interested in a multi-ethnic American modernism. Likht was an avid reader and follower of modernist poetry in English, and translated numerous poems into Yiddish by writers as diverse as Carl Sandburg, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the nine lengthy poems he published that he called ‘Processions.’ Pages long, they run through a gamut of styles and innovations and could justifiably be regarded as choice examples of the modernist ‘long poem.’”

A full translation of Likht’s “Processions” – by Bachman & myself – is now in progress. (J.R.)