Dead Men’s Praise (1999)
“Like Elizabeth Bishop, who wove her voice into a sestina so effortlessly you forget the form is there, Osherow makes villanelles, sonnets, and even Dante’s terza rima feel genuinely conversational.”—David Yaffe, The Village Voice
“Osherow’s direct grapplings with . . . tradition, however funny and chatty, have grave underpinnings: she’s concerned with the history, marginality and the threatened existence of the Jewish people. Such cares, combined with her formal versatility, make this a drama of the negotiation of cultures on a grand scale.” —Publishers Weekly
“In Dead Men’s Praise there is nothing Osherow’s lithe, sumptuous voice can’t take in and explore and hone down to this essential thought that ‘the endless business of creation does require our participation.’ And her participation (Hallelujah) is with these sassy, smart poems. She is a poet who makes me laugh, cry, think, and fall in love with poetry all over again.” —Julia Alvarez
Ch’vil Schreiben a Poem auf Yiddish
I want to write a poem in Yiddish
and not any poem, but the poem
I am longing to write,
a poem so Yiddish, it would not
be possible to translate,
except from, say, my bubbe’s
Galizianer to my zayde’s Litvak
and even then it would lose a little something,
though, of course, it’s not the sort of poem
that relies on such trivialities, as,
for example, my knowing how to speak
its language—though, who knows?
Maybe I understand it perfectly;
maybe, in Yiddish, things aren’t any clearer
than the mumbling of rain on cast-off leaves. . . .
Being pure poem, pure Yiddish poem,
my Yiddish poem is above such meditations,
as I, were I fluent in Yiddish,
would be above wasting my time
pouring out my heart in Goyish metaphors.
Even Yiddish doesn’t have a word
for the greatness of my Yiddish poem,
a poem so exquisite that if Dante could rise from the dead
he would have to rend his clothes in mourning.
Oh, the drabness of his noisy,
futile little paradise
when it’s compared with my Yiddish poem.
His poems? They’re everywhere. A dime a dozen.
A photocopier can take them down in no time.
But my Yiddish poem can never be taken down,
not even by a pious scribe
who has fasted an entire year
to be pure enough to write my Yiddish poem,
which exists—doesn’t he realize?—
in no realm at all
unless the dead still manage to dream dreams.
It’s even a question
whether God Himself
can make out the text of my Yiddish poem.
If He can, He won’t be happy.
He’ll have to retract everything,
to re-create the universe
without banalities like firmament and light
but only out of words extracted
from the stingy tongues of strangers,
smuggled out in letters made of camels,
houses, eyes, to deafen
half a continent with argument
and exegesis, each refinement
purified in fire after
fire, singed almost beyond
recognition, but still
not quite consumed, not even
by the heat of my Yiddish poem.