This Wrist of Mine

Rokhl Korn

So flimsy and gaunt this wrist of mine has become,
it seems like it could no more bear the sight of you,
as if it could be clasped completely, by a strap say,
by just a single, flowing teardrop.

My fingers, like ten forgotten commandments
from the burnt bush of our love,
frame my face—ten bloody signs,
like milestones to the last, inmost depth of pain.

But the deep, gaunt lines of my palms,
like harrowed veins, my bliss bleeding out of them,
still they flow faraway to unknown shores
seeking your lips, your smile and the sight of you.

translated from the Yiddish by Tanjil Rashid

Read the original in Yiddish

“This Wrist of Mine” is a translation of Rokhl Korn’s poem “Es iz mayn hand-gelenk,” which appeared in her collection, Basherṭḳeyṭ: Lider 1928-1948 (Fate: Poems 1928-1948), published in 1949 in Montreal—the first of her books to be published in her adopted home, having lost her own in the Shoah. Loss is the major theme of Korn’s postwar poetry, and this, too, is a poem about loss—lost love and a lost land. Note how she melds together her twin romantic and exilic preoccupations, longing for a lost lover as if he were a strange country, an “unknown shore,” or longing for a lost homeland as if it were an old flame of hers, “the burnt bush of our love.” The poem’s meaning isn’t clear, but its mood is, evoking nostalgia and sorrow by utilising striking, even absurd, symbolic images (a wrist so gaunt it can be clasped by a tear) and also Biblical language and imagery (the fingers of her hands as ten commandments) that locate her experience within an ancient Jewish tradition. It was this tradition, nearly killed off in her lifetime, that she sought to keep alive by writing poems about loss in what was, then as now, an almost lost language. Never was a language more appropriate to the experience of its poets than Yiddish was for European Jews such as Rokhl Korn.

Rokhl Korn was born in 1898 in Galicia (present-day Ukraine) to a Polish-speaking Jewish family. She began her career precociously, as a teenager whose short stories were published in the Polish press. After anti-Semitic pogroms at the end of World War I, she decided to abandon her native Polish for Yiddish, a language she had first to be taught by her husband Hersh. It was in this language that the young poet achieved widespread acclaim, beginning with the publication of Dorf (Village) in 1928, a collection of pastoral poems that established her reputation for natural imagery and symbolism. Fleeing the Nazis in 1941 she began her “years of wandering” through Russia, Uzbekistan, and Sweden, before finally settling in Canada in 1948. She wrote explicitly about the deracination and exile of these difficult years as a refugee in her collection Heym un Heymloziḳayṭ (Home and Homelessness), published in 1948. Once settled among Montreal’s many émigré intellectuals, Korn dedicated herself to writing romantic, nostalgic poems about the Jews’ lost homelands in eastern Europe. Elie Wiesel said of Rokhl Korn that “no one else has her ability to paint the landscape of a buried village,” praising her “eye to portray the rapport between a mother and her daughter, a vagabond and the sky, between a child and his longing.” She died in Canada in 1982, having written ten books of poetry and fiction.

Tanjil Rashid is a London-based journalist. He works for the BBC’s Sunday Politics, and his literary journalism has appeared widely in the British press from The Guardian to The Financial Times. His short stories have been published in StoryQuarterly and Hourglass, for which he won a Literary Encyclopedia Award. He was also shortlisted for the 2016 Harvill Secker Young Translator's Prize run by Penguin Random House, and is currently translating a comic novel by the medieval Majorcan author, Anselm Turmeda.