Unutterable Art: Jewish-Russian Poets Gain New Lives in English

There are only 110,000 Jews left in the post-Soviet states, the majority in Russia and a significant minority in Ukraine—two Jewish communities now living on opposite shores of a bloody war. Spaces of the former Russian Empire are not likely to produce another national poet of Jewish origin. At the same time, Israel, North America and Germany have gained large Russophone Jewish communities, whose members are writing in English, Hebrew and German, translating into those languages, and shaping their countries’ literary canons.

It’s a thrill to celebrate the publication of two first English-language poetry collections by major figures of Jewish-Russian literature, Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) and Semyon Lipkin (1911-2003). Both the Kyiv-born and Moscow-raised Ehrenburg and the Odessa-born and raised Lipkin originated from what is now Ukraine and made the Russian language their home. These English-language versions of Ehrenburg’s poetry (passionately transposed by the Russian-American poet Anna Krushelnitskaya and published by Smokestack Books) and of Lipkin’s poetry (lovingly curated by the late Jewish-British poet Yvonne Green and published by Hendon Press) come at a challenging time. A judgment of literary work is particularly complicated when Russia’s bombs and missiles are falling on Ukraine and, as a backlash, when streets named after Russophone authors, some of them Jews, are being renamed or unrenamed in Ukrainian cities.

Joshua Rubenstein, Ehrenburg’s biographer whose introduction adorns the new volume, offers this assessment: “[Ehrenburg] managed to survive Stalin, but in spite of his official conformity there was always a feeling about Ehrenburg that he was different.” Fiction writer, journalist, poet and memoirist, Ehrenburg possessed a peerless talent for articulating the vibes of history. Even before World War 2, Ehrenburg had been well known outside the USSR, especially to left-leaning intellectuals. In a letter to Walter Benjamin, dated Nov. 27, 1937, Theodor Adorno drew on Ehrenburg’s novel “The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples” (1922) to describe the position of the intellectuals exiled from Nazi Germany: “Dear Walter, … In all seriousness, I can hardly imagine our relationship to Europe as other than that of Ehrenburg’s travel company rummaging its way through her devastated cities.” Ehrenburg’s wartime journalism made him one of the most famous Soviets abroad. He was a principal cultivator of popular hatred against the German invaders, which he famously summed up in his article “Kill!” published on Jul. 24, 1942 as the panzers pushed ahead toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad, and also in a poem of the same title, included in the volume: “Like life—don’t eat, don’t drink, keep still,/ No breath, no word, except for—kill!” Legend has it that only two sections of army newspapers were exempt from being rolled into cigarettes: Stalin’s portraits and Ehrenburg’s articles. Soon after Stalin’s death, Ehrenburg wrote the novel “The Thaw” (1954), which lent its title to palliative de-Stalinization. Ehrenburg was never a dissident, yet his funeral in Moscow amounted, in the account of my late father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, to a demonstration of dissent.

Ehrenburg often treated poems as public diaries or lyrical sketchbooks. His early Jewish-themed poetry brings to mind the words of the philosopher Morris Feitelzohn in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Shosha” (1974): “I love Jews even though I cannot stand them.” Footlights of history—Spain, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the darkest years for Soviet Jewry, and the Thaw—easily annotate both Ehrenburg’s poetic silences and revivals. According to Boris Frezinsky, Ehrenburg’s leading commentator, Ehrenburg wrote about 800 poems, of which about 240 were written after 1938. Without Ehrenburg’s war and Shoah poems, we mostly have thousands of lines of average-quality verse. With them we have moments of supreme clarity, such as a untitled octave, written in 1943 after Ehrenburg’s visit to the front. In a literal translation: “There was the hour—the soul grew feeble./ I saw the orchards of Glukhov./ And on the apple trees cut down by the enemy/ [there were] now the posthumous fruits./ The leaves trembled. It was empty [all around]./ We stood a while and then left./ Forgive us, o great art,/ We haven’t protected you, either.”

This short poem about violence, war, and the Shoah reveals layers of Jewish history. Located in the Sumy province of Ukraine, the town Glukhov (Hlukhiv) had been an important center of Jewish life. In 1904, one third of its population was Jewish. Jews of Hlukhiv had experienced Civil War pogroms and Soviet de-Judaization; the community was nearly wiped out during the Shoah. In 1989, there were 143 Jews out of Hlukhiv’s population of almost 30,000 people. During the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, Russian shelling damaged the town’s Jewish cemetery. When one revisits Ehrenburg’s poetry today, one sees that for him, a crisis of civilization was felt most acutely as a crisis of art and measured most precisely on the scales of Jewish history. The outward simplicity of diction and the intimate colloquialisms make Ehrenburg’s poetry difficult to translate without formal losses or semantic excesses.

The outward simplicity of diction and the intimate colloquialisms make Ehrenburg’s poetry difficult to translate without formal losses or semantic excesses.

Anna Krushelnitskaya, a U.S.-based bilingual poet and translator originally from Russia, selected forty-two poems by Ehrenburg for the new volume, one third of them from the earlier work, and two thirds from 1939-1966. The volume’s title, “Babi Yar and Other Poems,” is a bit misleading. The first published poem about the murder of Jews of Kyiv in September 1941 was the long docupoem “Babi Yar” by Lev Ozerov, which appeared in Moscow in 1946. Western readers still think of the succès de scandale of Evgeny Evtushenko’s 1961 poem of the same title, which Dmitri Shostakovich set to music. Composed in 1944, Ehrenburg’s own poem about Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) was first published in 1945 in a cycle of six untitled poems. A modified version, titled “Babi Yar,” did not appear until 1953. While the word “Jew” did not figure in the poem, the line “And every yar is now my home” spoke to a national Soviet audience about the murder of Jews not just outside Kyiv in the autumn of 1941 but also in countless ravines and anti-tank diches across the occupied Soviet territories. Ehrenburg subsequently toned down his poignantly Judaic line “I speak for the dead. Let’s rise”; in Krushelnitskya’s translation, based not on the 1945 but on the 1953 version, the line reads as “We’ll rise; we’ll strain with all our might.”

Krushelnitskaya’s approach privileges prosody over diction. Many of Ehrenburg’s individual lines in Krushelnitskaya’s translation live and breathe poetry: “by the shallow creek where bulrush weaves” (“If you press your ear down to the ground”); “And the roused monastery/Plays its full carillon” (“Devichye Pole”); “The Kremlin’s pauper porphyry” (“Spring pushed around her snowfalls”). In seeking to capture Ehrenburg’s versification, Krushelnitskaya adds as much as twenty-five percent of extraneous material. “I’ll tell you of bygone childhood, of mama,/ and of mama’s black shawl,/ Of the dining room with a cupboard, with a big clock,/ And of a white puppy,” reads a word for word translation of the opening of Ehrenburg’s 1912 poem. In the new volume, the opening stanza reads:

I’ll talk of past childhood, of Mamma; I’ll talk

Of the black shawl my Mamma wore up,

Of our dining-room hutch, of our grandfather clock,

Of our little white pup.

What is the right balance of formal transposition and interpretation in translation? In “The Bullfight” (1939), an allegory of the Spanish Civil War, on which Ehrenburg reported from Republican strongholds, his voice is sparse and brittle. In a literal translation: “The ecstatic screams of the gawkers/ Met the burly bull./ In his eyes, big and wild,/ There was a deep longing./ Darts of offense trembled./ For a while he had been waiting for the enemy,/ [He] ran at bright loose garments/ And thrust his horns into emptiness.” Krushelnitsky’s inspired translation preserves the iambic tetrameter and even some of the non-masculine rhymes (which is not easy):

The burly bull came out surrounded

By crowds excited, cheering, raucous.

His big wild eyes looked out, confounded

And deeply sad, upon the gawkers.

The darts of hurt stung sharp like nettles.

He gave the foe a patient stare,

Ran charging at the bright muletas

And thrust his horns into this air.

Muleta, a great restoration of the name of a matador’s cape, comes at a cost. How can “darts of hurt” sting “like nettles”? (A rhyme is needed for muletas?)

Rhyming has a way of forcing the translator to make unwitting choices. In the finale of the volume’s title poem, Ehrenburg speaks of the murdered Soviet Jews as a collective we—voice, bones, and living memory. Literally: “We’ll strain ourselves and rise,/ We’ll rattle our bones [and go]—there,/ Where breathing bread and perfume/ [Are] the still alive cities./ Blow out the lights. Lower the flags./ We’ve come to you. Not we—ravines [yar in Russian means ‘ravine’ or ‘gully’].” In Krushelnitskaya’s version:

We’ll rise; we’ll strain with all our might;

We’ll rattle with our bones, exhumed,

Toward the live cities filled with light,

With bread and sharp cologne perfumed.

Half-staff your flags. Blow out your stars.

We come to you—us gullies, yars.

In this translation, Ehrenburg’s Shoah poem gains the quality of an oratory, and yet it would be difficult to sing the last line in English.

In 1950, while in Stockholm as a Soviet peace crusader, Ehrenburg met the left-wing activist Liselotte Mehr, a Jewish woman half his age who was married to Hjalmar Leo Mehr, Swedish Social Democrat politician of Jewish-Russian origin. Liselotte Mehr became Ehrenburg’s last love, and by some accounts, Ehrenburg’s willingness to carry out official Soviet missions masked a desire to see her. In 1965 Ehrenburg, who had two years left to live, penned the poem “Last Love”:

There are no seasons for the heart:

It’s tossed by winds that fate will summon.

Tyutchev’s was pierced by a strange dart

In his old age—a love uncommon […].

Like a costume, Ehrenburg tried on the destiny of Fyodor Tyutchev, one of Russia’s greatest mid-19th-century lyrical poets, whose love for and extramarital relationship with Elena Denisyeva, a much younger women and a writer in her own right, resulted in the composition of one of the most profound pages of Russian love poetry. Soon after coming to America with a Jewish wife and son in 1940, Vladimir Nabokov would translate Tyutchev’s great lyric with elegance, precision, and metrical nuance:

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
O tarry, O tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

While among the most accomplished ones in the volume, Krushelnitskaya’s translation recognizes the performative rather than imitative nature of translation. Here we have ageing Ehrenburg playing at ageing Tyutchev, and Krushelnitsky in turn playing at Nabokov performing Tyutchev in English. An assessment of how much of Ehrenburg’s own voice survives, and how much of Krushelnitskaya’s materializes instead, will depend on both the readers’ familiarity with the Soviet and Jewish contents and their vision of modern Anglo-American verse aesthetic.

Reading the poetry of Ilya Ehrenburg and Semyon Lipkin today, in English translation, helps understand the historical and cultural baggage ex-Soviet Jews brought to Israel, North America and Germany. Growing up, Ehrenburg and Lipkin had drastically different exposures to Jewish culture and Judaism. Ehrenburg was raised in an acculturated milieu and without Jewish observance. As a young author, he had made the international Parisian avant-garde his domicile, and he never really parted with it, even during the Stalinist period. During bouts of insomnia in wartime Moscow, when Ehrenburg wasn’t writing his searing articles against the German invaders, Ehrenburg translated French poets. And he was, of course, an official Jew who enjoyed Stalin’s favor. Ehrenburg strove to speak not in code but directly, to power and Sovietness, despising the proverbial desk drawer and managing to steer into print the greatest number of Shoah-related works. Even though Ehrenburg had no traditional Jewish upbringing (or, perhaps, because of it), he regarded Jewishness as an existential condition and, especially after the Shoah, as an essential category of being.

Reading the poetry of Ilya Ehrenburg and Semyon Lipkin today, in English translation, helps understand the historical and cultural baggage ex-Soviet Jews brought to Israel, North America and Germany.

With Ehrenburg’s younger contemporary Lipkin, things could not have been more different. As a child he observed Hayyim Nahman Bialik in the courtyard of Odessa’s Great Synagogue and remembered, rightly or wrongly, Bialik telling his father, in Yiddish, that a “poet must be a salesman.” Until his latter days in post-Soviet Moscow, Lipkin continued to observe Jewish holidays in the privacy of his home. His translations from the Yiddish included works by Perets Markish, Itsik Fefer and Shmuel Halkin. Having forgotten the alphabet but not the language, Lipkin relied on phonetic transcriptions of the Yiddish originals. Jewishness, for Lipkin, was something of an accident of birth—not to be obfuscated or abnegated, and not to be touted with pride. And yet both Ehrenburg, who died three years after Khrushchev’s deposal, and for Lipkin, who outlived the USSR and witnessed the great exodus of Soviet Jewry, writing both Russianly and Jewishly remained a lifelong imperative. So more the reason to regard them as facets of a disappearing civilization now increasingly preserved in translation.

Poet, translator, novelist and memoirist Semyon Lipkin moved from Odessa to Moscow in 1929, a protégé of the resplendent Odessan poet Eduard Bagritsky. Lipkin had a difficult time placing original poetry and turned to literary translation. In his prolific career, he translated and adapted poets and heroic epics of ethnic regions in Central Asia, the Volga basin, the Caucasus, and the Far East. While he enjoyed a sterling career as a literary translator, his first full collection of poems only appeared in 1967. Lipkin was a military journalist during World War 2 and fought at Stalingrad. He showed great civil courage when he safeguarded a copy of his friend Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate” following the novel’s arrest by the KGB in 1961. In 1980, he and his second wife, the poet Inna Lisnyanskaya, resigned from Union of Soviet Writers to protest the expulsion of two fellow contributors to the “Metropol” collective (1979). He was temporarily blacklisted in the USSR, but his books appeared in Russian in the United States. “Freedom” (or “Will,” 1981), a retrospective of Lipkin’s poetry, was edited by Joseph Brodsky. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s British biographer, writes in his preface to the new volume that “Lipkin … and his wife Inna Lisnyanskaya … formed one of the most extraordinary couples in the history of Russian literature,” inviting a comparison with Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam.

The volume features a number of Lipkin’s Jewish and Judaic poems, notably “Ashes,” “The Compound at Vilnius,” “Moses,” and “Odes[s]a’s Synagogue.” Lipkin resorted to Christian imagery in memorializing victims of Nazism and Stalinism. Discussing what defines a Jewish writer in Russia, Lipkin told me in 2000 when I visited him and his wife in Peredelkino outside Moscow: “Not for a single moment have I felt myself to be not Jewish. But I love Christ … consider him the greatest Jewish prophet.” Decades of translating the poetry and epics of different ethnic groups, including such victims of Stalinist collective punishment of nations as Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks and Chechens, made Lipkin exceptionally attuned to the persecution of smaller nations. At the same time, Lipkin’s writings about the Jews display an obsession with demonstrating that Jews are just as capable of wrongdoing as are non-Jews—as though the truism requires proof.

Traditionalists admire Lipkin’s verse, composed in the classical vein but occasionally betraying the modernist winds of his youth. He was hailed in post-Soviet Russia as a minor classic and an emblem of Jewish artists who had not emigrated and, Russian by culture as they were, have preserved a Jewish spirit. “I cannot part with [the Jewish theme],” Lipkin told me in 2000.

In the 1970s, Jewish motifs resurged in Lipkin’s lyrics. That Lipkin was writing Judaic religious poetry in Moscow in the late Soviet period is in itself remarkable. In several Jewish poems Lipkin steered past the censors, he resorted to allegory and Aesopian language. Perhaps most famously, a play on words and historical associations engendered his poem “Khaim” (1973), built around the coincidence of Khaím, the name of an actual river and a mountain pass in Eastern Siberia, and the Jewish name Kháim (Hayim, life in Hebrew). Lipkin resorted to coded messages in order to fool the Soviet authorities. He embodied the method of writing and reading between the lines, as recently catalogued in Marat Grinberg’s book “The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf.” While a superior master of verse as compared to Ehrenburg, in many of his poems, including his biblical verse, Lipkin may come across as cerebral. Lipkin’s best poems possess exuberant descriptions while radiating a Homeric simplicity of tone.

The cover of the Lipkin volume claims that the poems were “selected by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.” This is an innocent marketing ploy. In 1998 the Moscow monthly publication Novyi Mir ran Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Four Contemporary Poets” (1995). Solzhenitsyn’s essay belongs to one of the orbits of his book “Two Hundred Years Together,” in which he laid historical blame on the Jews while seeking to prove that he was not an antisemite. For Solzhenitsyn, Lipkin embodied the good Jew, whose heart ached for Russia and her Orthodox Christian destiny. The fifty-three poems Solzhenitsyn quoted from in his essay were the ones chosen for the new volume.

Yvonne Green worked from philological translations prepared by the Israel-based translator Sergei Makarov, who is married to Lipkin’s stepdaughter Elena Makarova, a Shoah cultural historian. Green formulated her method as follows: “by audio taping Russian friends reading [Lipkin’s poems] and using literal translations obtained word for word, line for line … I began my search to understand Lipkin’s poems and bring them to an English reader.” Relying on interlinear translations may lead one astray, as in Lipkin’s poem “Solikamsk in August” (1962), where the poet envisions a visit to a labor camp town in the Urals. In Green’s version: “To the right, the opera house, tribunal, reprisals.” In Lipkin’s original, the word “oper” appears, a colloquial abbreviation of oberupolnomochennyi, a Soviet law enforcement officer with special privileges. Something like “domain of the police detective” might have captured Lipkin’s intonation, ironic but not absurdist.

Where Anna Krushelnitskaya adds to and ferments Ehrenburg, Green pares down and distills Lipkin. A case in point is the long poem “The Technical Lieutenant-Quartermaster” (1961-1963), which Lipkin regarded as his “main” poetical work. Through the eyes of a young Jewish lieutenant, the poem depicts some of the worst World War 2 fighting in the south of Russia. Green is both at her finest and her weakest as a poet writing on the stumps of Lipkin’s verse. Consider a literal rendition of Lipkin’s Rabelaisian Russian: “Adyghean fermented baked milk and cheeses./ Dried fruit in woven baskets with two handles, in flagons, wine/ Of the local pressing—cheap, roguish,/ And a little turbid, the color of a Cossack saber./ On the zinc top tables—gleaming salt pork./ And goose giblets, and watermelons/ The women [of the house] had canned back in winter for the spring,/ Our first wartime spring.” And now Green’s version:

Baked milk and cheese from the Caucasus,

To reach into bins of dried fruit,

To choose bottles of cheap, mischievous, cloudy

Local wine, as red as the blood on the blade

Of a Cossack’s shashka.

Zinc-topped tables heave with glowing lard, giblets,

And preserved watermelons the housewives

Soaked in salt water for this, the first spring of the war.

Displacing meaning to endnotes, Green parades a museumist habit of not translating items of local use and deliberate names. In “Autumn at Sea,” old men in Odessa play dominos, in Russian zabivayut kozla, literally “slaughter a billy goat”; in Green’s translation, they “score goat.” Score goat?

In Green’s approach, prosody is disregarded; whole stanzas are moved around. This works with some of the shorter poems; it works less well with longer narrative poems. In Green’s version of “The Taiga,” one of Lipkin’s poems about the Gulag, raw beauty shines through:

… How long is it since felling’s plague

Raged in the forest, since axe blows

Seemed wiser than sacred language,

Trees fell like Jews, and every ditch became a Babi Yar?

Obscured is Lipkin’s original line of iambic tetrameter with a masculine ending, which literally means “And each ditch—like Babi Yar.” The line is directly in conversation with a line from Ehrenburg’s poem about Babi Yar.

Lipkin’s verse demands inventiveness from translators. His poem “Soyuz” (“Conjunction” or “Union”) is titled “And” in the English-language volume. Lipkin was in fact taken with the fact that in Chinese one character and in Russian one letter captures the name of an entire people, the Yi (or Nuosyu) in southern China. When published in the USSR, the poem was immediately attacked for its coded admiration for Israel (“Yi,” as in Yisroel), which after 1967 was openly vilified by Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda. “And” with an endnote doesn’t cut it, but what would actually do justice to Lipkin’s design?

One of the greatest challenges of literary translation is rendering imperfection. This is even more the case when one translates Jewish-Russian poets into English—going from a culturally conservative tradition to a formally liberal one while also negotiating hybridity and otherness. Translators pay doubly the price for the choices they make: the original’s flaws and the translation’s infelicities. But they also collect doubly the recompense.

In 1945, Ilya Ehrenburg “beg[ged] not for myself—for them”—begged the censors, and ultimately the country’s tyrant who as a young man had dabbled in Georgian poetry, to allow “nemnogo smutnogo iskusstva.” What is literally “a little bit of vague art,” in Krushelnitskaya’s version it becomes “some unutterable art.” In 1984, Lipkin spoke directly of his legacy, in a stanza Green rendered as:

If only four of the lines

I write in my old age

Could become prayers

In our horrible world.

If getting “unutterable art” and “prayers” across the boundaries of time and language should be deemed the translator’s principal task, both Ivonne Green and Anna Krushelnitskaya have succeeded.

Maxim D. Shrayer is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and the author of thirty books in English and Russian. A former refusenik, he was born in Moscow and emigrated in 1987. His recent books include “A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas” and “Immigrant Baggage,” a memoir. His new bilingual collection of poetry, “Parallel’noe pis’mo/Parallel Letters,” was published in March 2025. Shrayer’s works have been translated into thirteen languages.