TRANS Nr. 17: 7.2. - Madeleine Cohen: “I Sing the Song of Sunset”: Images of Time in Itsik Manger’s Last Songs

“I Sing the Song of Sunset”: Images of Time in Itsik Manger’s Last Songs(1)

In 1967 Itsik Manger (1901-1969), the fabled “prince of the Yiddish ballad,” published his final collection of poetry, entitled Shtern in shtoyb, stars in the dust. His first volume had appeared nearly forty years earlier, in 1929, with the name Shtern afn dakh, stars on the roof. There is no question that the juxtaposition of the two titles was one carefully constructed by Manger: he knew Shtern in shtoyb would be his final work, and would therefore complete the journey begun in 1929, and he knew that the world he would portray in it would be as different from the world of his youth as are the images of “stars in the dirt” from “stars on the roof.” Manger makes the connection explicit in the first sentence of his introduction to Shtern in shtoyb: “The stars that once twinkled on the roof are now wallowing in the dust.”(2) At first reading, the image seems to be one of motion (the stars have moved from sky to ground), and in much of his poetry, including in this collection, images of movement and journey are indeed central for Manger. But the words “amol” (once) and “itst” (now) draw attention to the fact that this is a movement through time rather than space, and these two images primarily represent moments that bookend the radical change that occurred in the world during the forty years between Manger’s first book and his last. For Manger, a Yiddish writer, that “change” was of course the hole left in Europe by the Nazi genocide where once his colleagues, his audience, his home, and the world of his inspiration existed. Shtern in shtoyb, as Manger’s final poetic voicing, is obsessed with its position in time. That is, the temporal distance between the writing of the collection and the trauma the Jewish people and Yiddish literature had undergone more than two decades earlier. The moment in time, historical and emotional, in which Manger and his poems are stuck, becomes the focal point—explicitly in some poems, implicitly in others—of the entire collection.

Manger created terms to define what he saw as the two central components of poetry: the internal and external music of a poem.(3) In the internal music of a poem one should understand everything that belongs to a poem’s content, its themes, descriptions, and images. Thus the images of evening that we will encounter help to create the internal music of Manger’s poetry. The external music then refers to everything that creates the “external sound” of a poem: its words, rhyme, form, and meter. The external music of a poem is especially important for Manger, as indeed the musicality of his poetry in general is central to him. Manger says: “There must be a harmony between the internal and external music. That is the sense in which I understand the musicality of poetry—the internal that unites with the external sound and becomes an organic element.”(4) In other words, the content of a poem must interact with the form of the poem; this adds richness and depth to the poem. To stay with Manger’s musical metaphor, if the content of the poem constitutes one melodic line, and the form another, then the harmony created by the two is equally as important and distinct as either form or content on its own. “Ovntlid” (Evening Song) is an example of a poem in which the harmony between internal and external music could not be more perfect. Whereas in a poem such as “Lid” (Song), the tension that exists between the two is as interesting, if not as perfect, as the harmony of “Ovntlid.” As we shall see, the form and music of Manger’s poetry and its interaction with the content is as central to the depiction of time in the poems as is the content itself.

Manger’s stimulus as a poet is to transform life into song. This is as true of Shtern in shtoyb as it was of his earlier collections. And yet Shtern in shtoyb’s position on the timeline in relation to the traumatic loss he, and the world, had experienced affects that poetic stimulus. Manger’s lifelong desire to turn life into poetry, and poetry into music, becomes in his final collection a desire to rescue a moment from the past, from the inexorable progression of time. He seeks to stop time, to freeze life in one more beautiful, whole moment; the last possible moment before the coming night. Thus one of the principle vehicles of time in these poems is in the image of evening. The attempt to save a moment by freezing life and transforming life into song may succeed, but the chosen vehicle of that transformation, the image of evening, and the accompanying threat of the night towards which Manger sees the world advancing cannot help but define the mood of his poetry. This paper will look at Manger’s images of evening as metaphors for the progression of time, as well as the role of song in Manger’s poetry using the examples of two poems from Shtern in shtoyb, “Lid” and “Ovntlid.”

“Lid” is an uncommon poem in Manger’s oeuvre.(5) This is immediately discernible in the poem’s form. The majority of Manger’s poetry is written in measured and often rhymed verse, that being the seat of the musicality of his poetry. “Lid,” however, develops its own pattern, but it is idiosyncratic and nothing so regular as a sonnet or ballad, two of Manger’s most common forms. “Lid,” like the poem “Ovntlid” which will be discussed next, employs two of the most central images in Shtern in shtoyb: evening, and song itself. In addition to using these central images, “Lid” can be said to represent the central motivation of the collection, as well: the perception of the approaching nightfall, threatening to embrace the world at the moment of Manger’s writing. Manger alludes to this poetic theme at the end of his introductory note to the collection, saying: “by and by I feel that the shadows are getting longer. Evening is falling. Night is falling. Good night, gentlemen.”(6) It is a dark sentiment, expressed in a carefree manner. And yet Manger’s imagery in Shtern in shtoyb makes clear that the poetry is haunted by this approaching nightfall. “Lid” gives an especially detailed account of what kind of an evening it is, and the nature of the passing time.

The sunset, the evening described in “Lid” is the downfall, the decline, the untergang ofa town at the outbreak of war. Each long stanza advances the coming horrors, slowly at first they encroach upon normal life, but by the third stanza the coming war has overrun everything else. This advancement occurs in the content of the poem, the story told, but in the form as well. In the first stanza our narrator listens to the normal sounds and occurrences of his town at evening: the smithy pounding his hammer, the tailor running his machine, a young girl dreaming. Only the final line introduces something out of the ordinary: the military are on the move. In the second stanza the war is prefigured by the arrival of “wanderers,” refugees or people fleeing from the front. These wanderers, with their “bitter smiles” know what the townspeople do not—and yet they don’t warn the town, they don’t disturb the mothers putting their children to sleep, they allow the false peace to continue.

The form of these first two stanzas follows a similar pattern: both begin with the refrain “Ikh zing dos gezang fun zunfargang,” and continue with a short line describing the narrator’s mode of observation: he hears, he thinks. The first two stanzas also have nine lines each, but the similarities do not go much farther. In the first stanza, each line has an end rhyme, and yet already in the second stanza the rhyming pattern begins to break down; in line 17 “hant” has no rhyme. As the content of the scene moves further and further from anything resembling normal life, and night approaches, the form experiences a similar descent.

The third stanza continues with the refrain of the “song,” but now the narrator’s mode is “knowing,” and the peace of the town has been completely disrupted. The narrator knows that the war has arrived; it is no longer something only heard or thought about. Immediately in the third line a change is made explicit: this evening the men have become strangely good, perhaps because they will soon have to join the fighting, while the women have become poisonous. The rest of the stanza obsesses over a description of the wartime prostitutes—ending after only eight lines, not nine as had the previous two stanzas. It is as if the poem, because of the upsetting content of the scene it describes, cannot support the one additional line necessary to match the pattern established by the first two stanzas. The rhyme scheme of this stanza has also decayed further; it has become simpler, with only two pairs of end rhymes, while the other four lines have no rhyme at all.

The final stanza describes a more detailed scene than any of the previous strophes, and takes thirteen lines to do so. Now the narrator “waits,” as do all the characters in the stanza. All of the waiting, by the narrator, the mailmen and those waiting for letters, suggests a moment immediately after the end of war, or at least after the war has finally moved through the town where the poem occurs. Mailmen arrive at homes with letters to deliver, which one would expect to be letters notifying families of the deaths of their relatives in the war.(8) And yet it is the mailmen who find empty houses; there is no one home to receive the letters. The narrator tells us what the mailmen do not know—the inhabitants have hanged themselves, though there is an ambiguity, a vagueness in the construction of this pronouncement, in the way that we are told they have hanged themselves on the window, the door, and the sunset. This moment, along with the moment earlier in the poem describing the hand lighting stars in the window, hints at the surrealism one finds elsewhere in Manger’s poetry. The verse describes the apparent suicides of the people who had been waiting as if their waiting simply turned into death, the scenes of their waiting turned into the scenes of their death. In reference to the person who had hung him or herself “by the sunset” we can at least turn to the symbolic usage of “sunset” that Manger has established in the poem. One could hang oneself on Manger’s sunset, the downfall of life brought about by war.

Again in this final stanza rhyme, while still present, builds on no pattern established in the rest of the poem. The poem’s attempt to establish itself as a song, as it insists in the refrain at the beginning of every stanza, simply fails. The narrator insists he is singing a song, but can such an irregular poem be called a song? The form cannot regularize itself while the scene it supports is spiraling so quickly into ruin. The insistent repetition of the refrain competes with the arc of the poem’s scenes. The refrain and its succeeding line (“and hear,” “and think,” etc.) is the only thing, in form or content, which manages to maintain itself throughout the poem. In all other aspects the form follows the story in its descent towards war and its aftermath. The form is in conflict with itself in its contradictory impulses to both maintain the song and accompany the descent of the story, and it is in this contradiction that the role of time in the poem becomes interesting.

The narrative of “Lid” proceeds, as far as the reader can tell, on a “normal” timeline, a straight, forward advancement through time. Though of course this “normal” progression is not normal at all, as it is a progression towards war, engendering the destruction of normal life and normal patterns in the town. This is reflected and harmonized by the decay of the poem’s form, its inability to establish a pattern. In that sense the form accompanies the subject of the poem through the sunset, the fall of evening, right up to the “foot of the night.” But the refrain, by nature of its being a refrain, a repetition, cannot forward the action of the poem and cannot accompany its forward motion. No matter what state the town is in, the narrator “sings the song of sunset,” even when it seems that the sunset should be complete and that night has indeed already fallen. The refrain’s ability to maintain itself regularly, alone of all the components of the poem’s form, demonstrates its strength in the song—no matter that “Lid” seems to be advancing into night, it is simultaneously frozen in time at the moment of sunset, in evening. As is, I would argue, all of Shtern in shtoyb. This is the juncture in which the reader can feel the presence of the author, writing in the 1940s or ‘50s, attempting to recall, recreate and transform a moment from the world that was. Here is the presence of the present in the remembered past. No poem in the collection succeeds in breaking through the nightfall in which Manger, at the time of writing, feels that he and the world are trapped. This is the strain between form and content, past and present, which creates the complex harmony.

“Ovntlid,” by comparison, is a song—truly a song—with all parts in harmony. It is fixed, like “Lid,” in evening, and yet there is no sense here of being “stuck” or “trapped” because the evening of “Ovntlid” holds no threat. In “Lid” the approaching night, which is the war or its aftermath, looms over the poem, a future moment that holds no hope, but in “Ovntlid” there is simply no coming moment, threatening or otherwise. “Ovntlid” is composed with a folksong’s simplicity of diction and of form, and exemplifies Manger’s poetic aim to transform life into song though its musicality.

Like in “Lid,” “Ovntlid” places the reader alongside the speaker in a state of constant, lasting evening. This effect is created as in “Lid” with a refrain, “shtiler ovnt. Tunkl-gold.” The image of the “shtiler ovnt,” has, like the English term “still,” a connotation of both quietness and motionlessness. Manger’s coinage “tunkl-gold” suggests the gold of a sunset, but as if burnished with age, the distance from the memories to the present day. Within this fixed evening the speaker sits in a moment of reflection, evaluating the day that is coming to an end and searching for what has remained of his experiences. In each stanza we are given a description of a moment experienced or observed by the speaker, and his wish for that moment to turn into song, to become a part of his song and thus something remembered and transformed. For Manger, song is eternal, and it is the poet’s job to transform the beautiful and the meaningful in the world into song, so that it may survive. Sol Liptzin phrases this, “Manger voices…his own feeling that everything wants to become song, everything which breathes, laughs and blossoms, wind, bird and cloud, teardrop and winedrop, chimney sweep and blind beggar, mother and child…above all, the longing that can find no other fulfillment.”(10) “Ovntlid” itself seemed to hold a special place for Manger as the expression of this poetic impetus. At his 60th birthday celebration in New York, Manger opened his speech by saying: “You will allow me a moment to catch my afternoon prayer, to say aloud my evening prayer. As has always been my custom, I will say the prayer from my own sider [prayer book]....” At which point he recites the first verse of “Ovntlid,” thus giving it the status of prayer.(11)

In the first stanza of the poem the speaker poses his reflection as a question—“What has become of my day?”—to which he answers: “A shadow and a shine.” Manger employs the image of a “shine” in another of the poems from Shtern in shtoyb, in which the speaker of the poem sees a mirage of tents “shimmering beautifully in the shine of vanished days.”(12) The shine is the light cast upon the present by past moments, memories. Here, the shine of memory is what remains from his day, as is confirmed by the images of each following stanza, each image illuminating a stanza of the poem. And the shadow? In the shadow we must be reminded, more gently here than in other poems, of the tremendous loss which Manger had survived and upon which he obsessively looks back: the destruction of the Eastern European Jewish world. In the same speech as was quoted above, Manger also employs and expands upon the image of the shadow:

The shadows are the ghosts born of the injustices experienced in the old world, and the shine is any song-like memory that can still be recovered from that lost world. Thus it seems that, while certain memories radiate light, others cast a shadow.

The moments of memory that the speaker invokes in the three internal stanzas of the poem are: a murmur of prayer, a breath of sleep, and a tremor of butterfly’s flight. It is noteworthy that, though each of these is an image, they are first and foremost moments in time. That is, it is not the image of the old Jew or his prayer itself for which the speaker wishes, but a murmur of the prayer, a moment of the Jew conducting his prayer. He does not want the metaphor of his sorrow sleeping like a chick, he wants just the space of a breath of that metaphoric sleep. Not the butterfly or its wings or flight, but a tremor, a tremble, the motion of its flight. From his evening position, the evening that never advances to night, the speaker wants to bring forward these small pieces of time.

And yet in the first and last stanza, which might be called the chorus of the song, the poet wishes for a moment of the dark golden color of the evening itself, the same dark-goldenness recalled in the refrain introducing every stanza of the song. The refrain on its own seems to establish the present moment of the poem, the setting in which the poet sits and recalls the moments from his past. And yet its status as another moment which the poet is seeking to transform seems to place it in the past as well—the “tunkl-gold” appears to be both present and past for the speaker, the “shtiler ovnt” is both the motionless evening in which he presently sits and a moment recalled. If one reads the evening scene as belonging to the past as much as do the other images of the poem, one could understand that there is no present moment in this poem, or that the reader is never invited to know it. The present exists in each of the speaker’s pleas to receive the moments into his song, and nowhere else. Thus, while the evening of “Ovntlid” represents a moment of reflection rather than a threatening abyss, it also seems to suggest that the present is absent, or empty. In the moment where the speaker sits and recollects, there is nothing but what he recovers from the past.

As mentioned above, the simplicity of “Ovntlid’s” form, its diction, its rhyme, and the regularity of its cadence all work to support and reveal the desires expressed in each stanza, the desire to transform life into song. In the musical details of its form, the reader understands that this is a poem written for oral performance. As Roskies reports, Manger “composed his poetry out loud, not on paper, and memorized all his own verse.”(14) Of his method, Manger himself says:

Manger’s method, then, is one of creating a poem in memory, memorizing it as he composes it. The result of this process is a highly mnemonic poem. Manger’s poems are not composed on paper, and neither are they composed to remain on paper. One could say that a poem, or any piece of writing, on the page exists more in space, as an object, than it does in time. But Manger’s poems are created (the writing of them is only secondary) as objects that exist in a moment of time, the time they take to be recited, which is itself controlled and structured by the very rhythmic and regular form of the poem. In this sense they are much like songs, which exist during the period of time in which they are sung. In the specific case of “Ovntlid,” a song whose goal is to remember must itself be easily remembered, thus the patterns and rhythms Manger creates in it lend themselves to memorization as would a song set to music. Considering these poems from Manger’s last collection, in which the importance of time and memory have gained in precedence since the earlier collections, the poems themselves as objects in time must gain in importance for their author.

Manger’s relationship to time in the 1960s as a Yiddish writer was, to say the least, complicated. He had been a young man in the golden age of Yiddish poetry, in both old world and new, and yet by the time he was just 45 years old Yiddish literature was in a desperate situation. It could survive the genocide that had devastated European Jewry as long as people like Manger survived, but where was the next generation of Yiddish writers and, especially, readers? The situation must have seemed hopeless—as if the Yiddish writer stood at the demerung, the sunset of an age, which is exactly the picture Shtern in shtoyb, and poems like “Lid” and “Ovntlid” paint. Time is then an intrinsic issue for Shtern in shtoyb because the collection knows its distance from the world of its origin and the moment of that world’s destruction, and each poem addresses that distance.

Manger’s career spans some of the most fascinating, exciting, and dismal moments in the history of Yiddish literature, as well as modern history in general. One can view his creative career as following the circuit of an entire day, from morning to nightfall, with each poem highlighting a point, moment, story, or image experienced during that day. From the final phase of his career, in the moments preserved in the evening songs, the pattern and shape of that day becomes clear, and the reader can look back with the last poems at the world Manger has transfixed in time and musically transformed.

1 Shtern in shtoyb (hereafter SiS) 38 “Lid” (Song) (“Kh’zing dos gezang fun zunfargang”). All translations are my own, unless otherwise cited.

2 SiS 6 (“di shtern vos hobn zikh amol gefinklt afn dakh volgern zikh itst in shtoyb.”)

3 “inerlekhe un droysndike muzik.” Quoted in Kazdan 57

4 Quoted in Kazdan 57 (“Tsvishn der inerlekher un droysndiker muzik darf zayn a harmonie. In dem zin farshtey ikh di muzikalishkayt fun der poezie—dos inerlekhe vos baheft zikh mit dem droysndikn klang un vert an organisher tayl.”)

5 It is necessary here to say a word about the Yiddish word lid. Like its German counterpart Lied, it refers to both a poem and a song. While there are other words in Yiddish that mean “poem,” lid is probably the most common term (followed perhaps by the “daytshmarish” gedikht). I have chosen to translate lid as “song” in order to emphasize the musical connotation of the word lacking in the English “poem.”

6 SiS 7 (“Say vi say fil ikh vi di shotns vern lenger. S’vert ovnt. S’vert nakht. A gute nakht, reboysi.”)

7 SiS 38-39

8 It has also been suggested to me that the letters resemble the deportation letters delivered to German Jews during the Third Reich. However, the description of the mailmen with “Franz-Joseph beards” seems to suggest an earlier time, perhaps WWI and not WWII.

9 SiS 12

10 Liptzin 362

11 “Vegn mayn veg in der yidisher literatur” Oysgeklibene shriftn 332 (“Ir vet mir derloybn a rege, kidey optsuzogn a minkhe, optsuzogn af a kol mayn ovnt-tfile. Vi s’iz mayn shteyger fun tomid on vel ikh opzogn mayn ovnt-tfile fun mayn eygenem sider....”)

12 SiS 16 (“shimern sheyn in shayn fun farshvundene teg.”)

13 Ibid 337 (“Mayn gemit iz fun onheyb on geven ful mit baladishe shotns. Iz dos a vunder? Ikh bin ufgevaksn in a land fun klasishn antisemitizm, in rumanie...poyln, dos land vu ikh hob gevoynt biz der tsveyter velt-milkhome, hot dos shotndike nokh mer farsharft.…Ot di ale shotns, vos hobn arayngeshotnt in mayn yidishn gemit, hob ikh gepruvt laytern in mayn balade un dos baladishe in mir un arum mir farvandlen in muzik.”)

14 Roskies 219

15 Quoted in Kazdan 59 (“Beklal iz dos onshraybn bay mir di laykhtste zakh. Ikh shrayb nit on a zakh un mek. Ikh trog es koydm oys in sikh, un ven ikh gey tsu tsum papir, hob ikh shoyn di zakh fartik. Amol hob ikh a strofe, amol a shure, un nit mer. Trog ikh zey arum—di shure, di strofe oder dos bild....der protses ken amol gedoyern zeyer lang, amol nit azoy lang...ober az ikh shrayb es shoyn on, hob ikh in zikh dos lid in gantsn fartik, azoy vi s’iz gedrukt.”)

	Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	Februar 2010

Sektion 7.2.	Zeit, Verlauf und Bestimmung Sektionsleiter \| Section Chair: Arnold Groh (TU Berlin, Deutschland) Dokumentation \| Documentation \| Documentation