Perhaps I am here for all eternity Forever young. […] They believe my light dazzles every gaze.
Yet I am nothing but rhythm, meaning, soul and music.
To rise up as on the world’s first morning, to bind oneself to the celestial heights, to dream oneself a bird and will oneself a flash of lightning: to come in order to dazzle through rhythm and meaning — such is the mission the young Sutzkever assigns to the poem. Everything rises up in Sutzkever. Everything surges forward in a movement of insurrection and hope: the trees, the mountains, the men, the poem, the poets, the light too. The light above all. Light standing upright? Incandescences. Darts of fire, ears of grain, even swords (p. 39). At the heart of night, and even when he could not know what his night would be, Sutzkever burns like the fires of morning. And from this blaze there suddenly emerges an explosion of intensity and thought, a rising of being, the “festival of a new day” (p. 8). The world belongs to the poet who rises early.
Everything vibrates in the elevation of these early poems, beginning with the light. Take “in the hut,” the first poem of Sibérie (Siberia; 1936). In the buried world, “the light of a hut shines,” the ice itself is “spangled, pierced with sparkling crystals,” “the Irtysh shivers-throbs in the unreal air” — beneath the silence “a world flowers.” The poet perceives birth everywhere, at the very heart of what would seem to forbid it: what surges up from the ice itself, “the quicksilver of flowers blooming without end,” what rises from the silence climbs “under the moon into the snow.” At the poem’s end “a dove pecks, pierces its egg and comes out toward life.” This dove returns in the poem to the father (p. 6): “crowned with the brilliance of the setting sun she sprang up and lifted me toward life” (p. 6). It is too little to say that the poet, “the embellisher, the sun-bringer” (p. 44), makes himself sensitive to these births: he provokes them. He is the one whose poem makes life itself rise like a light, like a flash — “by a silver ladder woven from my tears”: “the poet’s breath gives birth to paths and roads” (p. 21).
It is frequent that the tree figures this surge of life and that the bird, that tree which “stretches up into the heights” (p. 26), seems to pursue its flight, “I bloom, I soar toward the sky” (p. 17), while other birds take wing “where the cherry trees blossom” (p. 19): my wild hair takes root in the grasses, the leaves, the dust.
My green arms — green branches Flight of birds Toward the bearded forests (p. 22)
“I am,” writes Sutzkever, “the birth of the forests soaring toward the sky” (p. 31).
The entire universe of Sutzkever’s early poetry is made of these births, these elevations, these upsurges.
One often thinks of the two opening quatrains of Élévation (Elevation):
Above the ponds, above the valleys, The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas, Beyond the sun, beyond the ethers, Beyond the limits of the starry spheres; My spirit, you move with agility, And, like a strong swimmer who swoons in the wave, You furrow cheerfully the deep immensity With an indescribable and manly delight.
Set against these verses of Baudelaire those from “Terrestre” (“Earthly”): “you, you glide young and light” (p. 27), or those from “de ma couche froide” (“from my cold bed”): “you, aerial body who glides, / gladden your / questioner of fire” (p. 42).
Sounds “burst forth, strident” (p. 4), or chime (p. 7); lights “throb, sparkle” in “the dazzling brilliance of the winter sun” — “the pole star shines and twinkles.” Everywhere it is the birth of light: “dazzling light of the sun,” “marvellous fevers of the dawns” (p. 18). How one would wish to know the Yiddish lexicon of light. The translation, admirable, offers readers endless variations on these blazing lights.
One measures, through the compound words (one thinks of Aïgui), but also through the improper derivations (many nouns turn into verbs — “to nightingale,” “to night-wander,” “to forestify”), through punctuation at last, that the experience of incandescence goes hand in hand with a formidable verbal creativity: “the words fly off in quest of light and happiness” (p. 21). In the great poem “blonde dawn,” even as “the roots laugh,” as “the sky dazzles” and “the dews entwine,” a “chorus of pure sounds” bursts forth in the valley. Nuptial morning: “the water of the pond washes me of the blue night / and prepares itself for the festival of dawn” (p. 12). Every dawn is “the first dawn”
(p. 29): it changes and creates our being, it recreates, for a brief instant, true life. Freshness of great beginnings, surges and advances — the poet paces out the birth of worlds. One will think at times of Rimbaud, so closely does the force of these inaugurations accompany itself with a formidable verbal firepower.
As for the poet’s self, faced with these incandescences, it knows a marvellous advent: for these awakenings mean for him so many discoveries, rediscoveries, absolute recommencements of what he is, a sudden and ever astonished grasp of what he can do, since what he can do is his essence: “I rise up. I climb / the steps of the rocks / to reach the creator gods / in the heights” (p. 14). Sutzkever often calls upon his desire, which he breathes into granite, and still more upon his life, which “soars toward the light.” A vitalism in Sutzkever? Indeed it is, so much is he the one through whom life circulates, like sap between the beings the poem mobilises and animates, like that “blood that catches fire” (p. 19). The “sylvan songs” make the very being of the poet resound everywhere:
I see my body in the white of the birch I feel my blood in the rose in bloom, And in the metamorphosis of nature I weave a whole house of knowing. (p. 25) The poem that unfolds all the births, that shifts everything, in which “all the ‘I’s’ transform into ‘you’” (p. 30), is borne by a boundless confidence in the powers of the word and of the creator-poet. One will also think of Blake at times, so closely does this power of the word verge on the cosmic: “I want only with my arms / to burst the clouds / to purify my earthly head in the fire of the cosmos” (p. 36).
The mode is most often hymnic, since it is a matter of celebrating life as augmented and redoubled by expression in an overflowing joy (one will read in this spirit “the hymn to the rocks” (p. 35)). In the deeply poignant “children of tomorrow,” a poem written over “the abyss of history,” the child of tomorrow is invited to “strike up a hymn to our bones”:
The earth could not bury Their effervescent desire The rain will not extinguish it, The snow will not cover it. (p. 49) Sutzkever also composes prayers: these are not petitions but, once again, hymns — calls that pierce the silence and bring forth a world of quivering and impulse.
When he discovers himself a poet, Sutzkever is as if inhabited by the inaugural experience of morning that he evokes in so many of his poems. It is perhaps because his adventure is grounded from the start upon it, and because he was able to establish with the dawn a relation so powerfully happy, so immediately full, that his early poetry always gives — even in moments of doubt — an impression of confidence: confidence in things, confidence in language and in words, confidence in his own talent too, hope as if woven over the chasms of history.
Such is the starting point of the poet Sutzkever (at least as he is given us to read in the marvellous somme of Heures rapiécées (Patched-Together Hours)). One must remember this in order to confront the poems of the ghetto. There terror and pity reign: even if images of elevation are not lacking — “the waterfall falls and its fall radiates” (p. 54), even if the “song rises in me like the tide,” space contracts, energy begins to doubt. Horror bursts into the song. Then “our thoughts turned grey in a single night” (p. 61), the nightingale becomes an ant (p. 64), the grey of ashes everywhere prevails. And yet only a poet armed with the forces he had granted himself could have written, on 30 August 1941 in the Wilno ghetto:
Today here, Tomorrow there, Now in a coffin Like a garment of wood My word still triumphs (p. 71)
We have wished, by way of a first approximation, to try to circumscribe the conditions of possibility of this triumph. Tenax propositi? In one of the most impressive poetic enterprises that exist, Sutzkever’s tenacity, his perseverance, his poetic doggedness, do not cease to astonish and to overwhelm. He triumphed over the powers of darkness, he who wrote in 1994 in “a feather rings in space”:
That is why I say that you are always born tomorrow and marvel of marvels, you are always of today writing soothing smiles, transmuting forms and praying for the bird-men and giving them sun to drink, (p. 415).
Perhaps Sutzkever’s language, in its most dazzling power, is nothing other than this hope, ever battered, ever renewed — the genius of this poet none other than the grandiose and fragile pursuit of poetry itself.