Translation

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

He could not finish. The vowels were too heavy and when he breathed they cut into his lungs. Edith was in the room. He could hear her rustling. The whole universe was just a business, a foraging, an opaque muttering. He could feel the alphabet straining inside him. The branches of the letters were coming loose-he could feel each letter of his name go slack and drift. December 8, 1929, a Sunday. And if he left it incomplete? Better that the dialogue should lose its shape than close . . . and now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has revealed to me in my sleep: the point of all points for which there ... he felt a star inside him burst.

Light, light, light, light.

2

A version in a different language; the rendering of something into another language.

After my father's colostomy, but before the chemotherapy, when he could walk again, but with a shuffling still, a hunch and paunch of belly where the muscles had been severed by a knife, we walked together back and forth outside the hospital in Toronto's shiny business district, where all the buildings are skyscrapers made of steel and oily-tinted glass. His gut was still slit deeply, and the nurses came every day to clean and secure the bandages that held him together, the flesh fusing over weeks in hygienic, layered stages. In the filmy light of a city morning he looked ashen and old. The curly hairs that made a Caesar's crown around his head were flatly grey. His eyes were grey, his skin was grey, as if he would at any moment fade into the pavement. "The first time I came outside the hospital," he told me, "I thought I saw my father walking beside me, but then I realized it was my own reflection in the glass."

I left a few weeks later for Jerusalem and my studies at the Hebrew University. It had all been planned before the cancer and before the Al-Aqsa intifada; I couldn't see my way around it, so I left and my father remained. In Jerusalem I began to hunt philosophy in earnest, reading feverishly during the long year of my father's recovery. I was half a world away, reading whatever I could get my hands on. In the library I often moved by intuition, letting my hand scramble among the dark volumes, having no clear sense of what I was looking for. When some students from my class invited me on a trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to hear a talk on hospitality by Jacques Derrida and a panel of experts, I agreed to leave my room for an evening, and so stumbled into a problem that has troubled me ever since.

In the lobby of the Tel Aviv Opera House, tall barmaids in red sequins served wine in plastic goblets with labels declaring the sponsorship of the Bezeq telephone company. The lobby was damp with ocean air from the beach nearby, gauzy with heat and salt. Between narrow scholars in beards, we students-avid, nervous, dressed in ragged trousers-strode up a colonnaded staircase, over cool carpets, along a high-beamed balcony, feeling curious, glamorous, fizzing, until we found our seats in the back of a dazzling hall. None of us minded the thin air or the cramped back row because Derrida, with his white hair and white linen suit, was the very one we gripped our pencils for past midnight, making smudged notes in the margins of expensive books; for him the headaches and the beer; for him our lecherous professors and their dingy offices; our nonchalance and great fringes of hair. Mr. Harvard, who didn't "do" poetry, and Ms. Orlando, who wore plastic green triangles on little hoops in her earlobes, and Jeremy from Oxford who smoked mournfully outside our classroom, and dressed impeccably, and quoted the Greeks in Greek, were rapt. But I could not follow the speakers for more than a few words at a time. I watched the interpreter for the hearing impaired concretizing abstraction with her long fingers, and a deaf man in the first row reading her hands and making vigorous, sweaty notes. I thought how close we were to the ocean, and wondered whether there were porpoises in the Mediterranean. Each time I returned to focus on the panel I slid away again, as if their voices were made of TurtleWax.