Three Poems by Abba Kovner translated by Rachel Neve-Midbar

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In the Blue Mist

In the blue mist of an abandoned night highway

between the beauty of the Givat Chaim mountains 

suffused into a single silhouette against the night sky 

and suddenly from the right the burst of  a hooowwlll—

so close

like something cut with the light touch of a knife—  

or the animal within us brought to her knees in birth;

I’m afraid they will never leave me

these involuntary tremors,

the haunting voices

that ambush me

in every language—even in silence

despite all the ways humans are strange—mammals

who rise out of my body with a wail. 

Suddenly a slit in the mist

from the hit of your headlights

making you so clear and cold  

that a cry rises from within

heard by both the living and those resurrected

now in the grind of every day 

within wedge of the mountain. 

All My Vows

Kol Nidre

It’s possible to love your enemies,

to love them precisely, innocently and 

with a whole heart: Monica had two braids.

In my imagination one is as chestnut as a chestnut,

and the second threaded with silver strands.

But you all already know

how she cried for me

endlessly

and I only asked for a single cilium, an eyelash

to cull in the morning. That morning. When you smiled.

God doesn’t have braids like Monica’s, but

our missiles really, really resemble

the pieces of stone I used to shatter my neighbor’s windshields. 

Is it worth it to once

harm even the eyebrow of a child? Be damned!

Ahhhh, even your love is cursed.

If you could just shatter that single window

and open the wide and sky sight 

through which my dead observe my life.

A Vow

When I wear my cap. Return my feet to my shoes.

When I come close to the city and that night plague.

When the conceits of your mouth fade from my lips

and the earth returns to spin on its axis.

And I am no longer able to turn my face away

and we no longer can identify each other—always

lingering like a lilac branch 

that sudden scent of your body

(The Hill of Three Crosses and the Adi Villa),

because you and I will always be bursting 

into bloom worlds from here and until 

the very end of springtime.

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Abba Kovner (1918 – 1987) was a Hebrew speaking Jewish partisan leader, and later Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a victim of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. Living underground in the ghetto, his attempt to organize an uprising failed. He later fled through Vilna’s sewers into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, fought and survived the war. After the war, Kovner made his way to Palestine in 1947. He later gave extensive testimony about his war experiences at the Eichman trial. Rarely translated into English, Kovner is considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, and was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970.

Poet, essayist, translator, and Fulbright Scholar, Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014, winner of The Clockwork Prize). She is also the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, July 2023). Rachel’s work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. Currently Rachel is the recipient of a Fulbright postdoc to translate the poems of Holocaust poet Abba Kovner in Israel.

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26 January 2024

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Translator’s Note

While on tour in the USA in 1972 Abba Kovner told his audience: “When I write I am like a man praying.” Yet, he said, in the liturgy, “a man should not say his own prayer before the prayer of his community…But the community in which I..say my poems is half alive and half dead. Who are living and who are dead? I don’t know how to answer this question. But I believe there is one place in the world without cemeteries. This is the place of poetry.”

Kovner never left the dead behind. They fill his poems, ghostly voices, their presence floating through the lines: his mother, his beloved and the hundred thousand murdered in the killing grounds of Ponar. Family and friends fallen in the Vilna ghetto. His partisan comrades from the forests where he fought rising out of a kibbutz shower drain. These ghosts have appeared to tell their stories. The poet is only a witness.

Poetry of witness, writes Carolyn Forche, is “a plea against despair..not a cry for sympathy, but a call for strength.” Kovner wrote poems as a youth, but it was only after the war that he returned to writing poetry seriously. The enclosed poems depict those early poems written in Europe and Palestine just after WWII.

It is now that the poetry of witness becomes ever more important. Kovner’s poetry is almost unknown in English. I translate him in order to carry his witness out into a global language so we might remember: in man’s inhumanity to man there are no winners. Only ghosts.

*From the Introduction by Shirley Kaufman in A Canopy in the Desert (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973)

**From the Introduction by Carolyn Forche in Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton 1993)