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from Harasim by Avot Yeshurun
trans. Ariel Resnikoff & Riv Weinstock



when I called my daughter who was born Helit, Natan Alterman said, he hid & she’s Helit. I hid my face like the veil of the ark to the sight of the tiny size of her face peeking out at me in hiding.

—October 1, 1991

            *

in a bit
i’ll leave here
to express her
won't scab over.

no witness
of time past
only half
his witnesses.

—May 2, 1991

            *

don’t leave me a shortest ray
pressed between the clouds in insult
rather, leave me a flash line
from sun to sun.

—Nov 1990

            *

holy is my death.
one day will come & say “enough.”
another will come in yr place.
will come & receive its portion
in the world.

—Dec 1989

            *

the soul is hard
as a sole
which all the shoes
tread on

—Dec 1989

            *

if i came to choose for myself a ground for the world to come
i wdn’t have been able to choose among the days of awe
& if i chose my death day, i wd’ve chosen the fast of gedalia, today.

—Oct 2 1989

            *

i insert
all the bird droppings in the poem

—1989

            *

do you have an apron?
of all womens’ garments
the apron preserves the smell of the house.
bc she wiped her hands on the apron
my mother from the stove.

—1989

            *

unified fate for person & house.
removal of the cluster of the head, the liver, the spleen & the bowels.
shriek of the bowels & roar of the heart muscle.
dragging the stove
person dies.
house destroyed.
person dies you don’t sense the progression of death
house destroyed before yr eyes.

—June 1989
Avot Yeshurun (b. Yekhiel Alter Perlmutter, 1904–92) was a translingual-Hebrew poet who fused Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic grammar and lexicons into his Hebrew writing. Yeshurun was derided for his radical language-mixing poetics and was cast out of the Zionist literary establishment by his contemporaries who were threatened as much by his diasporic politics as they were by his mongrel Hebrew, claiming that he wrote “in a language of rags.” Harasim is a recently published collection of “shards” from Yeshurun’s papers, edited by his daughter, Helit Yeshurun.

Areil Resnikoff’s most recent works include the poetry collection, Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System 2020), and with Jerome Rothenberg, the translingual epistolary collaboration, A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan 2021). He is currently a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in multilingual poetics.

Riv Weinstock is a multimedia artist, designer and translator. Her work investigates the creation and maintenance of memory, identity and reality in relation to the composition, destruction and erasure of our landscapes, in order to continuously search-out an understanding of what is happening around us.

Mark



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