Not only paintings and the Fate of painters inspired
Sadeh's Poetry: Music was also one of his main themes.
He died an easy death at the afternoon
To the sound of his friends who stood around him, singing.
It passed in Dresden, on the sixth of Nov., sixteen-hundred seventy two
His main works: "David's Psalms,
With several Motets and Concertos", 1619.
"The history of our Lord Jesus' Cheerful & Glorious
Resurrection", 1625.
"Sacred symphonies", in three volumes, 1636-1657.
"Small Religious Concerts" in two volumes, 1639-1645.
"The Seven Words of our
Beloved Saviour and Redeemer, The Anointed Jesus, on the Cross,
Composed in a most moving mood". 1647.
All these I read in a book, And this too;
"After his death, he was soon forgotten".
The somewhat dry tone of this poem, is, of course, to balance sentimentality. Even so Sadeh's compassion shines through. One of the main aims of his poem is to get immersed in the fragrance of religious works.
Sadeh writes of course also of the fleeting Fame in this world - although here he might have been mistaken, because Schuetz's fame still lingers in his works performed everywhere, in churches and in secular performations.
P. Sadeh: To Two Esteemed Ladies, (Poems), p.24
Sadeh wrote several books of poetry, prose and literary essays - like Poems 1947-1970, Poems 1985-1988, To Two Esteemed Ladies, (a book or poetry), and his last, Ich Sing Wie A Faigele(a Vogel, a bird: The poems are in Hebrew, but the title is in Yiddish: "I sing like a little bird", a song his mother used to sing him when a child). His debut consisted of the novel called "Life as a Parable": his books are made of prose and poetry.
His second book where prose and poetry consist an indivisible unity is "The Book of the Yellow Peaches".
He wrote also a novel, called The Human Situation, planning to it a second part, but never reaching it.
Another poem based on the all-importance to him of music:
Beautiful music I hear. Sweet music
The morning sky through the window-panes. Clouds and easy wind.
Sweet music I hear. In Afghanistan
The former president, Ali Butto, was hanged. Maybe in Pakistan.
In Iran, too, they hanged the Premier. Thus it was broadcast
Just now in the news. It seems, Premiers thus transpire.
Beautiful music I hear; sweet music. Bizet, La jollie fille
Du Perth. Nietzche praised him highly. Ultimately
He preferred him to Wagner. Well, though, did he not
Go a bit too far? Yet, how sweet is the music, so sweet.
The engineers of the Communication System are on strike today. Thus
it was broadcast just now in the news. So are the tax-collectors, postmen,
The musicians of the Philharmonic, the members of the medical profession.
For a moment I deemed I heard: the mendicant profession.
How sweet is the music I hear.
And the beautiful girl. My god, the beautiful girl in the green meadows, in the sheaves of
light like lace between the pine,
In the Valley of Esdraelon. The girl I loved. The love which wounded my heart. That melted my heart. And all the years that passed.
Beautiful music I hear. Sweet music.
Still the news;The deed of ratification of the peace-treaty with Egypt
Will be exchanged tomorrow. The ratification. What a word. What else still might these fellows still invent.
The girl with the beautiful feet walking on the lawn, amidst the white flowers.
She is now redeemed by Death, the right-honourable.
She is walking, singing.
After so many years I hear her song. I see the flowers.
The shadows the pine trees cast on the grass. Her feet, the adorable.
Sweet music I hear, this morning, in the scorching wind.
Blowing from the south, from the Sinai deserts.
Farewell, fair maid of Perth, on the shores of foggy Tay.
Peace be with you, maid of the Valley of Esdrael.
My years on earth are numbered; never again shall I see you.
Beautiful music I hear. Death. Flowers white. The gloom of pines on the lawn.
The happy flute's melodies.
Where do you draw me to now, my soul?
What does it mean the sadness and the pain, the sweetmness of the morning?
Oh, beautiful music.
Pinchas Sadeh is a religious poet - not in the institutionalized sense, but in a most individual way of personal experience. I started liking his poetry - and prose - (he did both) reading his most famous novel (translated into English by Richard Flanz, first published in Great Britain 1966 by Anthony Blond) Life as a Parable. This book presented some of his poetry, the main bulk of which I came to know in his Collected Poems 1948-1970. I started translating his poetry (after doing some work on his works of prose), out of sheer love to them.
I am very content that internet was born; it gives me an opportunity to present these poems to a larger public. True, English is my second language only; yet, I hope my translations will answer readers' anticipations and help to spread Sadeh's, my favorite author's fame. Well, there are so many trends of translation, and tastes are different.
I want to thank here - the first, surely in those pages not the last time - one without whose help these pages would pnot come true - GABRIELLA. I want all of you know what a swell lady she is. She learnt to be human (but she always was) - through suffering. But of her - at some other time. (In the meanwhile you may visit also her site. you can find it at the bottom of this page, just click on it.) But for now we shall have to return to Sadeh's poetry. These also know of suffering - as you, kind reader, may have already preceived.
Out meanest suffering comes from loneliness. Witness Sadeh's poem
You lie at midnight on your bed. You do not dream and have no illusions.
You do not dream new dreams, do not any more
Expect to hear your lover's footsteps on the stairs.
You do not see tomorrow hold in store solution
To your hardships not to gone day's sorrow
Like to the flickering lamp's yellow light, like to the clock's ticking,
Like to the fluttering in the wind of the shutters,
You go on and on asking, and still again you ask, where's your happiness fled
so many days.
And you ask, whereto had the wonderful isles gone away, in which red-beaked birds
Sang amidst the branches of your childhood palms.
And you know, that your life lies with them as a corpse, smling
Under worlds and masses of deep, heavy foods.
But then, take not of the parable (Matthew XXII, 1-10) of the king
who held a feast, and sent his slave to call the worthies who were invited: and they
Refused to come.
And thus the king did say then to his slaves: Go and stand
On the thoroughfare and all that pass call then to the feast.
And thus tell them: Come to the king's party, ho all of you ho all,
The poor, the naked, the unclean, the sinful, unhallowed, you the taxcollectors, you,
The lost sheep of the world.
Come hither, you all, and the king will receive you.
If they did not come the sunny days and bright hours, the spree of your life,
If the red-beaked birds did not come to sing you at the windowsill of your room
Songs of love sweet and enticing, -
Attend alone to the fruit and the wine?
Throw open your heart's gates, get thee down to the crossroad.
Call all who pass to the banquet laid.
And thus tell them: Come you all to the feast, ho you all
The heavy gray days of slow rain, you days of storm, you heavy hours.
Come, sorrow, come, distress, and you too, agony, and you too forgotten memories,
You, pride and solitude, come' all my mistakes.
Come, all of you to me, sit around the table.
Eat of my bread - my body: drink the wine - my blood. Come
Lie down on my pillow
And be with me one flesh.
If "The Parable of the Feast" exemplifies womanly loneliness, the following poem does so concerning the forlorness of a man.
Epithalamion
A man lies on his bed, it is dark
But his eyes see the maid his knees touch hers
He send his hands to embrace her lips are open
He feels her she is white she is warm and tender
She is painfully fair and bright till it smarts but she is not here
Who will pay for his thin time in hell
In the darkness he lies in the grave on his bed
Flowers bloom in the world rivers flow girls love
He lies amidst his sheets and blankets and his eyes are sad
Darkness pours over his room like waters that fill the sea
Her knees touch his he sends his hands to touch her in caress
But she is not here
Flwers bloom in the world rivers flow girls love
Clouds ride like light angels stars are ablaze in flame
But who will pay for his pain
Who may forgive God who wrought him and forgot
Him Lying in his grave on the bed of the sea, the boundless deep,
While darkness puts its arms around him and his body is put out like
Light to and his soul
Now he lies peacefully on his bed his eyes close he falls asleep.
Egyptian Night
The Maid;
On the sandy path
So slowly - my heart was sinking -
I have born the basket
With my little sibling.
Water, reeds around;
I lay there a-shiver;
Afar now I knell
Dusk sets on the river.
The Waters;
From the springs in hills unknown
Abyssinian abysses
Shaded by brown date-palms
And carobs like molasses
By the yellow dunes
Dry and dead reed and grass
Under the silver moon
Endless we flow and pass.
The Maid;
Ho you holy waters
Please flow still and deep.
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.
Please do not wake him
Flow by slow and mute
Carry him tenderly
Hea's a boy so cute.
The Waters;
In most deadly silence
Like angels in the ether
Amidst mourning shores
We pass and travel.
Not like you, the maiden
Kneeling on the shore,
The Maid;
Now the night has come.
Darkness reigns and quiet.
The sky is calm.
The earth iis silent.
Ho you holy water
Please flow still and deep
There in the reed basket
The child is now asleep.
Religion - and all he, (Sadeh) as a modern man felt about it was the only and main subject Sadeh dealt with in his poetry and prose. He actualized before his inner eyes the heroes of the Bible - the ancient kings of Kanaan, (The Book of Genesis, chapter 36), Moses, (Moshe), his sister Miryam, David, and others.
These are the Kings that ruled in Edom
These are the Kings that ruled in Edom;
Bela, Beor's son, of Denhaba, the Golden; Jobab, Zerach's son, of Bazra;
Husham of Theman, form the South; Hadad B'n Badad, whose town was smitten;
Samla from Masreka, the town of the crimson wine; Saul
from the Paths of the River; Bel'Hannan, Achbor's son.
And Hadar of Peo, who wed Methabel, Mitrad's the king's daughter,
The daughter of the town at the shores of the scarlet-gold water.
David, Jesse's son in his psalms, in his hymns in verses
Called for God from the depths of abysses.
When in deepest distress
In his loss, in his sins, in his stress
he prayed to the God of his Fathers.
But who will comprehend what fear means
when, for a moment, the veil is lifted from above the silence
that spreads about there beyond the mourning, and the nought,
from beyond existence!
These are the Kings that ruled Edom;
Bela, Beor's son, of Denhaba, the Golden; Jobab, Zerach's
son, of Bazra;Husham of Theman, from the South; Hadad B'n
Badad, whose town was smitten:
Samla from Masreka, the town of the crimson wine; Saul
from the Paths of the River; Bel-Hannan, Achbor's son.
And Hadar of Peo, who wed Methabel, Mitrad's the king's
daughter,
The daughter of the town at the shores of the scarlet-gold
water.
Mystical, Neo Platonic tendencies appear in Sadeh's peoms
like in the next one, speaking about "unio mystica", the
mystic union of the soul with the divine experience:
I did yearn to become as nought
I did yearn to become as nought, in such sleep deep from
deep
That God's hand may touch me into salvation.
I will sleep my sleep into the deepest night. My dreams
asunder
I will send, like branches of trees towards the stars.
I shall plant my breath into you, balmy breeze, breath of
winds and spirits, into the scent of oranges
That extract their gold from the broken crust of the earth
beneath.
And I shall see how the transience and transsubstantiation
rule all, the blue turns black, the brown grows gold, and
there is between them no division.
As also my happiness, transformed into sorrow, will return
as rapture, although, to be sure, there is, after all,
between them no division.
There is a body of poems of Sadeh I call "Poems of Creation":
Two lines: After the Rain
Look at the miracle and see:
God has put leaves on the tree.
Five lines: I saw the god descending
I saw the gold descending on the trees to bless us.
And the vapours I saw rising from the belly of the earth to be watered.
And the east I saw growing purple at sunset.
And I heard the birds rising in their flocks from the earth.
And I saw the earth in its splendour while being created.
That may be the strange power of poetry: everyday phenomena - "the birds rising in their flocks...", indeed the purple sunset - that the poet writes about and lo! there they are in his poem in all their freshness, as if one meets and sees them in his innerest eyes for the very first time.
Seven lines: A letter
To the much-honoured. The worthy philosopher. Baruch Spinoza.
And as for your words: That it is impossible for God to wish not to be.
I shall answer thus: That for God nothing is impossible.
Among His countless forms He may exist as Absence, as Nothing, if He please.
Like birds fallen into the sea. Like morning-mist. Like love.
Because, right-honourable, our life is Love and the Death that comes after.
Be peace to you, sir, from me.
DO you remember, perchance, those old almanachs, with poems of summer, autumn, winter?
The Gods
I see gray clouds.
White clouds, azure clouds.
It cannot be but the autumn
is coming, winter is at the door.
I think a year has passed.
Inside Time, in the depths unfathomable
Life changes, time is at its own;
Gods pine away, expiring, gods
die and grow alive anew.
Something happens there, full of godly wisdom,
Full of love, fear, longing and misery.
Only a slight echo reaches our life.
In the Spring I slept
In the Spring I slept, in the summer I died, but you, fall, brought me back to life again,
In you always my first love awoke,
Entwined, like
a bush, by the leaves of my days and my nights.
Embarrassed, proud, hopeless,
Like you, am I.
And such was my first love.
And that is why I do live only in you again,
Because what is a man's life altogether, if not
His very first love all over.
You are listening to Yanni - "The Rain Must Fall".
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