The world lost a wonderful member
of the literary community in 2017—Chana
Bloch, poet, translator, and teacher of generations
of creative writers and students of literature. I attended her memorial on
October 8, 2017, at Mills College, where Chana taught for more than thirty
years. It was moving to see women who had studied with Chana decades ago returning
to campus to recount how Chana had changed their lives, including professionals
who did not end up as writers but were still profoundly shaped by the
experience of working with her.
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| Chana Bloch |
Chana had a fantastic sense of
humor, and she was a modest person, free of pretention, despite her numerous
accomplishments. She collaborated on some of the best contemporary
translations of Hebrew poetry. The English version of Yehuda Amichai’s
collection Open Closed Open that she created
with Chana
Kronfeld is to me one of the finest literary translations of contemporary
poetry into English. A friend told a story at Chana’s memorial about this book:
Amichai was terminally ill while the two Chanas were working on the translation.
The poet was pressuring them to finish so he could see his best collection in
English before he died. According to the speaker at the memorial, Chana Bloch
and Chana Kronfeld resisted the demands of the great Hebrew poet, knowing they
would probably only have one chance to get the translation right, since books
of poetry in translation rarely go into multiple editions. As it turned out,
the Chanas finished their work to their satisfaction, and Amichai lived to see
the book in print.
Chana Bloch’s translation in
collaboration with Ariel Bloch of The Song of Songs is
one of the most beautiful renditions of a biblical text into English. Their version
brings out the freshness of the language and the imagery, and returns the
romance and the raunch to The Song of Songs:
Let me lie among
vine blossoms,
in a bed of
apricots!
I am in the fever
of love.
This book of the Hebrew Bible is
often bowdlerized in translation till the sensuality becomes only symbolic or veiled.
Chana was determined to create a nakedly beautiful Song of Songs, and she
succeeded.
Chana Bloch’s own poetry is full of
tantalizing complexity. The poet Judy Halebsky
spoke at the memorial, recalling that she had asked Chana when she was a
student at Mills College about an emotion that she was trying to express in a
poem, which had not yet come across as she’d intended. Chana told her, “Every
emotion is actually two conflicting emotions.” That’s not only true in life,
it’s true in Chana’s poetry as well.
In Chana’s poem “The Joins,”
included in her collection Blood Honey, she refers to the
Japanese art of kintsugi, a method of repairing
broken pottery where the seams are sprinkled with gold dust to create a
gorgeous pattern out of the breaks. From the first line of the poem, Chana
makes clear that she is speaking in metaphor:
What’s between us
often seems
flexible as the webbing
between forefinger
and thumb.
Seems flexible,
but it’s not;
what’s between us
is made of clay
Human relationships are almost always
Chana’s subject. Even though she’s talking about a technique in pottery, the
poem is clearly about breakage—emotional, psychic, global:
We glue the
wounded edges
with tentative
fingers.
Scar tissue is
visible history
In Chana Bloch’s poetry, she begins
with the assumption that we are all wounded. But by recognizing
those injuries, by learning from the pain, we can reach a state that might even
be better than innocence:
Sometimes the
joins
are so exquisite
they say the
potter
may have broken
the cup
just so he could
mend it.
A couple of times Chana visited a
class I taught regularly on contemporary world poetry at a college in San
Francisco, where she spoke about the writing of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia
Ravikovitch that she had cotranslated. I have to confess I was a little
jealous of how instantaneously my students bonded with Chana, a stronger
connection than I’d been able to weave during an entire semester. I think that
ability to win the trust of students came from Chana’s piercing intellect, her
genuine warmth, and her disarmingly frank comments, delivered in her Bronx
accent. It just wasn’t in Chana’s constitution to be anything less than
completely honest, as a professor, a poet, and a friend. I miss her.
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
