Like all great poetry, Hayim Nahman Bialik's Hebrew verses are shockingly language-specific. Biblical and Talmudic resonances ring out in almost every line together with the strange freshness of an ancient language coming back to life. So I always thought that Bialik was untranslatable, until I read Peter Cole's razor-sharp, sonorous, loving translations. What is more, Cole’s introduction to this volume may well be the best essay ever on Bialik and his oeuvre, as it brings out a devastating irony : the poet’s signature poem, “On the Slaughter”—written in the wake of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev—reads today like a bitter, proleptic threnody for the victims of the massacre of October 7th; of the unthinkable, vengeful catastrophe of Gaza; and of the pogroms being perpetrated against innocent Palestinian villagers on the West Bank by savage Jewish settlers. Great books—and poems—have their own fate.
—David Shulman, author of Tamil: A Biography
It's here, Peter Cole’s translation of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s famous and infamous poetry about the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom along with a compact selection of the poet's other visionary, strange, passionate, and mournful works, which are just as striking and durable in altogether different ways. These translations bring us a living voice, nuanced, melodic, orchestrated with touches of rhyme that seem inevitable, less the product of a translator’s will than of the desire of language itself. But first there is Cole’s introduction: so finely tuned, with pulsing syntax and shapely thought, readers might not be in a hurry to reach the poems. Until they do!
—Forrest Gander
Look closely: and Bialik’s angry, explicit, uncontainable but also transcendent witness to genocide will blast away the cynical and selective attempts of nationalists and authoritarians to appropriate his work. Peter Cole is one of our greatest living poet-translators. With his note-perfect ear and an intensity rooted in scholarship one finds a music entirely equal to the task.
—Vivek Narayanan
Once upon a time in Odessa, Hayim Nahman Bialik forged a modern Hebrew poetry, with a Biblical ear for lamentation, exile, longing, rage, blame, shame, and revenge along with an achingly contemporary recognition of their glorious, holy, and cursed echoes. Peter Cole makes these verses vivid, visceral, and chilling with both his prescient translations and his essential commentaries.
—Charles Bernstein
Bialik’s poetry flies up as ‘a hidden spark in the stone of my heart.’ Peter Cole’s translations glow with that Kabbalistic spark. These poems catch Bialik’s huge range: rage, grief, curse, prayer, celebration, irony, tenderness. Here is the father of modern Hebrew poetry in electrifying modern English, recording in horror the pogrom at Kishinev but also echoing the Psalms in praise and gratitude. Bialik died in 1934, but he seems an inescapable poet of our day.
—Rosanna Warren
No voice comes closer than Hayim Nahman Bialik’s to capturing the agonizing interplay between Jewish hunger for redemption and the inadequacy of its devotees. Peter Cole—a major poet himself—has mastered the consummate master of contemporary Hebrew letters, rendering him into English, after so many others have tried, with unrivaled clarity, erudition, and multilingual precision. Here is Bialik taking his rightful place in the larger poetic world.
—Steven J. Zipperstein
