Jewish history

Two Poems by Crescenzo Del Monte

Crescenzo Del Monte 1868-1935

What I enjoy most as a translator is bringing poetry or poets to the English language for the first time. I have enormous esteem for the many translators of Dante, Belli, Montale and other Italian poets who have benefited from the efforts of a multitude of translators. Each new translation offers up a slightly – or drastically – different take on the same poem or author. Taken together, they create a composite portrait of the original work, not unlike reading multiple biographies of the same person written from different perspectives and points in history. But there are so many important voices still lurking in the shadows of literary history, stalking the margins, and that’s where I like to spend most of my time.

Much of my translation work has dealt with the poetry of Mario dell’Arco, a poet almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world a quarter century after his death. He is not much better known in his native Italy, or even in Rome, his birthplace. This despite the fact that he had a six-decade long career, published dozens of collections of original verse as well as versions of classical Roman poets like Martial and Catullus, and wrote books of prose including biographies of his Romanesco predecessors Belli and Trilussa. The point being, I noticed a gaping hole in the literature and made a conscious effort to fill it. My hope is that others may take up the gauntlet and try their hand at Dell’Arco, adding something to the portrait I’ve begun to sketch into English of this great poet’s work.

What has any of this to do with Crescenzo Del Monte, you ask? Well, Del Monte is another poet who has gone the way of the dodo, to put it bluntly. Yet he is arguably one of the five major Romanesco poets: Belli, Pascarella, Del Monte, Trilussa and Dell’Arco, in order of birth. Del Monte differed from the others in that he was Jewish, and wrote in Giudaico-Romanesco, the dialect of Roman Jews. He was a versatile writer who wrote in Romanesco and Italian as well, and did many translations of others’ work into Giudaico-Romanesco, such as a version of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno.

Like Belli, Del Monte can be forbidding because of his meticulous renderings of his characters’ actual speech patterns, as can be seen in “O’ ‘nvitato a pranzo” (below), and the surfeit of Hebrew words which are often half-masked through transliteration (chalomme is the Hebrew word for ‘dream’, חלום, pronounced chalom). Also like Belli, he offered up copious notes to his poems; practically every one has a glossary of terms to help the reader along. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he was preserving a world in his work, a world that now exists encoded in the poetry he wrote between the destruction of the Roman ghetto and the Fascist racial laws. (To hear a reading of Del Monte’s “La Cena de Purimme” – “Purim Dinner” – which bears a close resemblance in both theme and language to “The Lunch Guest”, including the same rhyme of chalomme/makomme, click here.)

I was lucky enough to have been able to study Hebrew in at the Jewish Cultural Center in Trastevere as well as in the ghetto, where for a time classes were being held in the local bookshop, Menorah. I’m by no means fluent, but I have enough of a grasp on the language and its historical-cultural milieu that I can find my way through the jungle with a candle and a machete.

As far as I know, there have been no other translations of Del Monte’s work into English. If I’m wrong, please reach out and let me know! Sgrùulla!

Published in Packingtown Review.

*an alternate ending to the above poem – one more faithful to the original – might read: A cup of coffee and then nighty-night/tomorrow it’ll end up in the toilet.

Published in THINK

*line 8 of the above poem should read “with your long beak…”

So you mean my mother’s not a Khazar?

The genetic evidence is in and we Jews are basically what we’ve been saying we are all along – a people. No, not a “race.” But a people with a long history which goes back to, you guessed it, the Middle East. So say the results of two recent genome studies as reported a few weeks ago in the NY Post.

This already raises spectres. Who wants to have their identity confirmed by genetics? Suppose the results were negative. Then would Jews not be a people? Jewish history is absorbing and complex, brimming with migrations and intermarriage (shhhh!), conversions and just about anything else that can happen to people over a period of thousands of years, and then some. Somehow, we are still here, which is the really interesting part. How did we get to where we are?

The Khazar theory has apparently bitten the dust, and with it will go The Invention of the Jewish People, last year’s shock-schlock bestseller (well, if you count France and Britain). Shlomo Sand’s thesis was essentially that what we call “Jewish history” is little more than a Zionist construct. Cui bono, you ask? Clearly to appropriate Palestine from its rightful occupiers, then swindle the world with tall tales of expulsion and diaspora.

Martin Goodman reviewed it for the TLS, concluding that:

In a self-glorifying preface to this book, Sand describes his role as that of a revealer of inconvenient facts suppressed by a malicious political and academic establishment. Some of those who have expressed approval of his book may believe that, like the Israeli New Historians whose discovery of genuinely new data on the events of 1948 has indeed caused much discomfort to that establishment, Shlomo Sand, too, has faced opposition because he has unearthed something new. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Shall Shlomo Sand now eat humble pie?

* If any of you are seriously interested in critiques of Sand’s book, Anita Shapira reviewed it here; Hillel Halkin’s review is here.

Michael Oren On Why Israel Matters

A great historian, Michael Oren is also Israel’s ambassador to the US. In this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he discusses why Israel matters and the meaning of Jewish history. As articulate as he is in his writing, he can’t seem to quite find the words to express his sense of wonder at the longevity of the Jewish people and the existence of the State of Israel. But he wrote the book on the Six Day War.