Translation

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Grushka, Reesa

I did not speak in secret,

At a site in a land of darkness;

I did not say to the stock of Jacob,

Seek Me out in a wasteland

-Isaiah 45:19

1

Change or conversion to another form, appearance, etc: a swift translation of thought into action.

ON THE LAST MORNING OF HIS life Franz Rosenzweig woke in a familiar room transformed by light. In a wide band across the rug on the floor where birds locked together in blue and clementine and rose, the sun had stripped colour to a pale luminosity. Two silver candlesticks on the wardrobe doubled their width with shimmering, and to look toward the little mirror on the wall was to be, for a bright moment, blinded. He was surprised that he had slept and dreamed. Through the long dark hours, the sound of his own breathing, the bubbling of air through water, had frightened him. He had stared into the misshapen shadows of deep night with superstitious wakefulness, and by the time the darkness lifted, he could feel the liquid weight of the infection in his lungs. Now the morning had come, and he could hear Edith and Raphael in the hallway, his son saying "Mother, the grey sweater is so itchy, I'll scratch it off before lunch," and Edith sighing and relenting. He felt exhausted. So this is morning, he thought to himself, like a man who'd washed up on an island when he thought he was going to drown.

In snatches he had dreamed of the war years, of his post with an anti-aircraft unit at the Macedonian front. He'd dreamed the silence of that mountain base, more than ten years before, and the work he'd fastened onto there between unlikely airplanes, whose flight it had been his duty to record, burn up, and send swiveling down. For the most part Rosenzweig's unit had been untroubled by any immediate experience of the war, and he did not regret it. The mountain, he'd felt sure, disdained time and wars altogether.

The first day he had woken stiff from the hard cot, stepped from his tent, and looked out over the valley below. It was green with pasture and streaked with the shadows of hunting hawks. Then the Earth rose to foothills brilliant with fireweed, sloped up toward a skin of trees-mostly sycamore, and closer to the peaks, dark pine-and finally, at his feet, exposed bare rock. The air was cold. A light frost had settled overnight on the stubborn scrub grass squeezed between the stones, and the leather of his boots had grown stiff, his lungs raw. That first morning he'd found a small, flat stone as he was walking above the Eastern precipice, teasing his fear. It was perfectly round and smooth, the kind of stone you find in riverbeds. The quartz had caught his eye, glinting in the hard, foreign sunshine, whose sharp edges warmed his face though his back was chill.

In the months that followed he would crawl early from his tent and address the morning, giving it a name-Monday or Thursday-Monday or Thursday, he would say out loud because nobody would be there to hear him. The Sergeant would already be on patrol, making notes about yesterday's targets and this morning's observations. There would be a mist in the valley which the sun was already beginning to clear, and he would feel his sleep clearing in the same manner, replaced by a powerful hunger. We will not die here alone or pierced by metal, smattered with blood, his hollow belly told him. It was a kind of courage.

In his dream, he'd sat to write a letter to his mother. His real letters had been cruel. He had been young then, and on professional terms with grief. When his father had died earlier in the year, 1918, he had mistaken death for a loss that could be overcome by reason and determination. "Poor mother," he'd written, "poor Mother, and you have nobody to care for. You must learn to live for yourself." But in last night's dream his pen would not leave any ink on the stiff paper. Looking closely, he saw it was no pen at all, just a tiny dandelion stem with only a few winged grey seeds clinging to it. From the forests below him there had risen all at once hundreds of swallows, and they were calling in their alarmed manner so that he'd been deafened by the noise and had had to press his hands over his ears.

"I offer thanks to You, living and eternal King. For You have mercifully restored my soul within me. Great is your faithfulness." He had repeated the same words in the same manner every morning for years, whether he believed them or not. After the disease had taken his voice from him-taken it where? What becomes of a man without a voice? -he said his prayers inside himself, except when his friends and pupils led their bedside services on Fridays. His belief now wavered frequently, not belief in God so much as the certainty he'd like to remain inside his body. In the night he would suffer from an itch he could not scratch. Or the pressure of the bed against his thigh bruised, and it was for the night nurse to think of rolling him over. Sometimes the rolling woke him from a desperate sleep. If he wanted to kill himself, he'd need to find someone to cut his wrists for him, and did he want to die, did he really? He had to admit to himself that he did not. He was scared the way a boy would be of his own bedroom in the dark.