Translations naturally arouse impress. Not just for a writer’s skill in deriving the truer nature of another’s emotion or thought keenly enough that they might give it another name—all so that a third might, too, hold it: understand and feel it—but, better for the deft elevation of another’s voice in the writing, learning the reasonings, their diction and meaning, and all while never losing their own. And still, Carlie Hoffman has done just this in translating Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters, for by way of visceral imagery coupled with biting diction, her efforts not only celebrate with her in courage or mourn with her grief, but have indelibly safeguarded the heart of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s original lines: our humanity, cracked open and laid bare.
There is almost too much to say about the work. Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters, compiles her witness under Nazi occupation and her imprisonment in a concentration camp where her life would be taken. From such a story, one would expect emotion, great waves of it, pummeling line and again, and one would be right to assume it. It cannot be helped, feeling as if the air has fled your breast when, Meerbaum-Eisinger says, Hoffman translating, they are “a song in a minor key, / weil es an den Herbst [an omen for autumn],” and we try to stifle the understanding of death’s threat before it is addressed: “wie ein Kind, das traurig ahnt, [like a child who mournfully knows] / daß es krank ist und bald sterben soll, [that they are sick, and death is close.]” (“Dried Leaf, pg. 33). Where it is not just the colloquial understanding of an emotion tied to the image, autumn leaves, through pretty and bright, beckoning summer’s—life’s—close for a time, but that, for both, they underscore the weight that knowing of, preparing for, “death [which] is close” turns the stomach more because of what it signifies, and they tell it to us straight rather than metaphor.
Of the many beautiful pieces in Song of the Yellow Asters, my favorite was how the images played a part in the translation as well, as Hoffman writes in the biographical sketch to follow, that she chose to keep the original title to “reflect ... [Meerbaum-Eisinger’s] conviction that nature offers a language for loss and survival” (pg. 160). It is interesting to consider that even with two languages at the ready for these lines, there are some pieces of it that words alone cannot contain. How can you contain the “sun ... suddenly light[ing] up,” after years of grey when “[o]ne day, a magpie will be heard” (“Song of Joy, pg. 101). What about shedding the body to become rain, “travel[ing] barefoot / from country to country,” while it remains imprisoned and in danger, without hope until even “[t]he rain weeps in me” (Untitled Section from Romances Sans Paroles, pg 115). Poetry becomes a third tongue in the mix, a bridge between Meerbaum-Eisinger and Hoffman, traveled by both, becoming the perfect foundation from which to speak.
The emotional evocation of her imagery is one that I prized in other of Hoffman’s works, present in spades here and Meerbaum-Eisinger’s original, (“a thin dress hang[ing] like a laugh,” in “Spring,” pg. 37, or the “rosebush in your garden / yearning to be green), for how the pairing of ironic diction shifts meaning to create a more dynamic emotion, one that is not simply fear, or sadness, or joy, but the two wound together because what words alone can possibly contain the magnitude of Meerbaum-Eisinger’s experience. What does it mean to end such a haunting image with laughter? How does that contend with the image of a young girl between 15 and 17 starving and surviving things much worse? One thing it does is stoke rebellion. The line is not given to grief or despair wholly, though the emotion is plainly there, but in the end, it is still retrieved for something calling forth the idea of joy. It is this dichotomy that raises Meerbaum-Eisinger’s voice atop a chorus. The idea that, through the worst a person might inflict on another, humanity wants to fight, we want to scream, “I want to laugh and bear all my burdens. / I want to fight, know love, know hate,” even as we cannot help but admit our unintelligible fear or grief in the face of it: “You will come, won’t you? I won’t weep anymore. / ...You are not here—and you were so close, / ... Spring is weeping” (“Happiness,” pg. 132-133 / “Red Carnations” pg. 86-89). This idea of complex humanity, where one can retain their joys, their fight, and hold fast to faith for a people entirely, even while facing their cruelest, stands a backbone throughout the collection, inspiring careful attention to the line.
Which is why the friend and villain of longing may just yet be the most painful throughout Song of the Yellow Asters, because it asks the unanswerable question of why? How could they create this horror, who let them, and why to me? Why do we keep letting it happen?
Of the collection, this is the poem I kept coming back to, grief in hand, as we pick at something known missing:
Softly you strike a note in your song—
feel the missing something.
...
one is too pale
...
and the third is so full of immensity,
far too full.
...
Suddenly you hit a key
and—no sound comes.
The silence is like a mockery to you,
because you suddenly know:
This is the missing thing
...
You fear the unplayed note forever,
fear the happiness that grazed you
“Song of Longing,” pg. 52
To me, this poem holds everything, the delicate, searing balance that Song of the Yellow Asters’ humanity might mean: an aerialist’s dilemma with one toe about to land, only to find empty air. In the early section of the collection, “Song of Longing” is the first to name that hollowness, the empty sorrow of what is missing, that freedom, her life, stolen out from under gripping fingers, but even more painfully, there is the knowledge that we “know this is the missing thing...happiness [emphasis added],” but only the “graze” of it, now possibly “unplayed ... forever” (52). It is this unapologetic reality, the human condition offered up without cover, that makes Song of the Yellow Asters so important: as much today as during her life. Because emotion is connection, living breath, stoked by poetry so that we don’t just understand it but are asked to take it up alongside.
In Song of the Yellow Asters, Meerbaum-Eisinger’ feels it all: shares it all. Hoffman bears it all: transposes it, so that that sharing isn’t lost to time, least of the barriers, and amid all that rages in a heart so young, we garner something given candidly.