Yiddish/Hebrew Poetic Bilingualism

The above essay embraces the modern phenomenon of Yiddish-Hebrew bilingualism in poetry through an examination both of its origins and its current form. It begins with Bialik and his writings in Yiddish, undertaken as a way of reaching the people, not in order to replace Hebrew with Yiddish. The former was, after all, the heart and soul of Bialik’s poetic career. It was, likewise, extremely important for Aaron Zeitlin, who was a translator of Bialik’s Yiddish work into Hebrew while remaining an influential Yiddish poet himself. Also, it was the lifeblood of Uri Zvi Greenberg, formerly an Expressionist Yiddish poet and finally a renewer of the Hebrew language. The article examines the literary motivations and linguistic and social environments of these three poets as “translators of themselves” — “autotranslators”— and renderers of their tradition.