Rishon Rishon

Hebrew

I read Nelson Ascher’s latest post yesterday with interest. I wanted to say something about Hebrew poetry, but what I was thinking seemed ill-formed and uninteresting. I returned to Nelson's post just now, and found this anonymous comment:

Also, in Russia there has been a long tradition of musicians putting poetry to music, thus creating popular (in a true sense of the word, not "pop") songs. This is somewhat different from France, where the poets have put their poems to music themsleves - I am thinking Brassens, Brel, Moustaki etc. (correct me if I am wrong). Russian examples of this would be Vissotzki and Okudjava. This Russian tradition has spilled over to Israel, and with a vengeance: I'd say that a great majority of the popular (and even pop) songs in Israel are classic Hebrew poetry that was put to music.

Now that’s something interesting! It’s true. Poets in Israel are national figures, household words. You often hear their words on the radio, put to music. I can’t think of anything similar in the US. I don’t think it’s true, though, that they are the majority.

There are some other interesting things about Hebrew poetry. First of all, there’s the phenomenal time-depth. Israelis have access to a literary tradition going back 3500 years. Much of the Bible is poetry. Of course there’s a whole book of Psalms, but there’s a lot of poetry elsewhere too. The oldest known Hebrew inscription (most writings are known through copies) is a poem, the cohanic blessing.

יברכך ה' וישמרך
יאר ה' פניו אליך ויחונך
ישא ה' פניו אליך וישם לך שלום

Y’varekh’kha Hashem v’yishm’rekha
Ya’er Hashem panav elekha viyhuneka
Yisa’ Hashem panav elekha v’yasem l’kha shalom

May the Lord bless and guard you
May the Lord shine his countenance on you and have grace upon you
May the Lord lift up his countenance to you and grant you peace

It loses a lot in my translation, for one thing its brevity. Here’s a word for word translation:

May-he-Bless-you Lord and-guard-you
May-he-Shine Lord his-face to-you and-grace-you
May-he-Lift-up Lord his-face to-you and-put to-you peace

This regains some of the original brevity, but now you have to get past the broken English. (Actually I left out the implicit “he” in the second verb of each line.) Brevity is one of the things I like about Hebrew, as well as its ability to rearrange words in almost any order (without using cases!), the ability to play with numerous words of the same root, and its large number of onomatopoeic words of the form: XiXXeX (for example: gilgel – roll, milmel – mumble, rishresh – rustle). I also just like its sound.

We often hear about the miracle of rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken language. It was miraculous, but in a slightly different way than is usually thought. The story goes that Eliezer Ben Yehuda “almost single-handedly” created Modern Hebrew from a dead language. Without diminishing the greatness of Ben Yehuda, this is simply not true. He was the leader of a movement which included a lot of people, but more important: Hebrew was never dead. Hebrew was the literary and intellectual language of the Jewish people throughout its history. Though it was nobody’s first language from about 500 to 1882 CE, when Benzion, Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s first son, was born, an enormous number of poems were written in it as well as works of prose, intellectual and rabbinical literature, even science. In this way it resembles many of the world’s languages: Latin in Medieval times, Sanskrit throughout most of its history, and Modern Standard Arabic. The birth of European national languages in the 18th century as literary languages led, eventually, to the demise of Latin. If it were not for the birth of Israel, the same movement would have led to the demise of Hebrew too. Today, few Jews outside of Israel know Hebrew. The miracle of Modern Hebrew is that it was created by the last generation that could have done it. One more generation and it would have been too late.

UPDATE: Don’t miss the rest of Nelson’s comments.

UPDATE: The anonymous commenter is Alisa in Wonderland.

Posted by David Boxenhorn at August 9, 2004 04:41 PM