Bullfight
I love this poem,1 which appears in Blat Oyf an Eplboym (Leaf on an Apple Tree, 1955) and also in an abridged translation in the Harshavs’ big book of American Yiddish Poetry.2 Perhaps connected to Leivick’s own trip to Mexico in the forties, or his other journeys around South America, but there’s no specific date or place given.
But what indelible imagery.
Bullfight
Six they were — Six brave, bewildered, bulls. Six foolish bulls, And perhaps not foolish at all. For in truth — How were they to know What an arena means And a crowd of forty thousand? What they mean and what mean Toreadors, And riders, And spears, And swords, And treacherous cloths? Even a man would be no wiser If held for days in the darkness, And chased out into the arena Flooded with flaming sun And attacked with darts and picks And eyes maddened with red, And the crowd laughs, roars, gasps — What would he do, the man? Truth be told, What would remain for him to do, If not to leap about as though on scalding coals, If not to turn round and round And strike his forehead against all the fences, In his own dizzying shadow, In his own flight of delusion. Oh, six unhappy bulls, Six foolish, fooled, bulls; Your dream, Your luck, Your fiery, flaming yearning — Your death. Six poor, condemned bulls, My heart is with you And not with crowd and toreador. But what comes of it? In truth — What comes of it Is that the dream is full of mockery For you and your useless horns. The sword pierces your spine The picks deep in your entrails And the crowd roars And the toreador is jubilant, And you, one after another, You fall, you fall, you fall. Six they were — Six brave, bewildered, bulls. Charging, foaming, bleeding — And now they are dragged with a chain by the feet Down from the arena, And their horns, useless, drag behind; And the sharp sword dangles Extinguished in the hand of the toreador, And the crowd sits, roared to exhaustion, Crumpled like a traitor — the truth. And the sun, too, extinguishes behind the arena, And the sun, too, is dragged with a chain Down from the heavens, Down from the heavens, Down, down.
The form here is interesting, as it’s not his usual tightly rhymed quatrains, or one of the many sonnets which appear in this book. The sun, which has reached its zenith sets, descending, as the poem descends to its close. Everything moving downward — the bulls, the crowd, the sword in the toreador’s hand. Even the poem itself; the lines which leapt now drop — sometimes mid-phrase — to the next. Everything dead, worn out, extinguished. Falling.
There’s also a bit of what Charney calls his ‘internal refrain,’ the repetition of a word or phrase. Or, perhaps, even a stuttering of the injured tongue which appears and reappears in his work.
While the theme of the bullfight likely relies on his frequent travels abroad, the imagery and language render the subject intensely personal, as in most of Leivick’s work. The central image of being dragged up into the light and blinded, is one that recurs in Leivick’s prose works. In Oyf tsarisher katorge (In Tsarist Katorga, 1959), which describes his experiences in prison after being sentenced to labour and exile for membership in the Bund in 1906, Leivick recounts his being placed in a cell entirely devoid of light for having slipped off his chains. He is retrieved by a guard, unable to stand or see in the light, and taken, half carried, to have tighter chains smithed onto his ankles.
The same incident is also recalled in the chronicle of Leivick’s visit to the survivors of the Khurbn in Germany in 1946, Mit der shayres hapleyte (With the Surviving Remnant, 1947). There, the memory of his punishment is triggered reflexively by entering the darkness of the barracks of a Dachau sub-camp, then emerging into the light of day. He briefly turns his anger on the sun for having continuing to shine through the war as if nothing had happened, before conceding that perhaps it, too, is a victim.
‘Bullfight’ is, in fact, is surrounded by poems dealing with prison, both under the old, Tsarist regime and the new, Soviet one. And Leivick highlights the significance of this in the introduction to the book, saying that it isn’t organised just by order of composition, as is his usual, but thematically. He hands the reader the keys.
The children lock their fathers in the old prisons fitted with new bars. Moyshe Kulbak is in these pages (striking his head against the wall), as are Bergelson, Markish and Der Nister; all handsome, heroic, deceived and betrayed. Their trials, such as they were, and deaths all brutal, bloody theatre.
The ‘Eternal Two’ which give this section of the book its name are also there: Cain and Abel.
Leivick’s empathy, as a former prisoner and a Jew living in a world after the Khurbn and Stalinist purges, lies with the innocents whose deaths and dragging away in chains remove the very sun from the sky.
You fall, you fall, you fall.
Picasso, Corrida, ink wash, 1957. For me, a visual link to last week — doesn’t the mounted figure to the right of the bull look a bit like Picasso’s Don Quixote? And if I stay with Picasso, perhaps the bull from 1937’s Guernica is relevant here, as well?
All five of you know I love everything, don’t you? And I want to give everything I can.
It’s intensely frustrating to me that a lot of the poems in there are abridged. In the case of Leivick’s poems, it often seems to me the editorial decision was taken to ‘improve’ the poem by removing a weaker or less-focused section. Harshav’s version omits the stanza starting ‘Oh, six unfortunate bulls’ and the next, significantly reducing it. The most mind-bending of these edit to me is the inclusion of only the last few stanzas of ‘Clouds Behind the Woods.’ I’ve produced a draft of a complete version and it’s such a weird, wild thing.
"Even a man would be no wiser"
What else is there to say?