The Power of a Question

For Irving Howe

You are sinking. There is no question.

There is nothing you want.

The woman has become a fading flame.

The book's title page is sealed with no solace.

Even a drop of Mozart

does not sweeten

the aridity of the hour.

You are a squirrel in confrontation

with an uncracked nut

and the marvelous computer

is refusing to serve.

But a bright voice on the telephone

transmits a question:

Is it not accurate to assume

that the word "then" does not exist

in your poetical time,

and that everything is actually a single boundless present?

I said yes and the responsiveness that was lost to me

flowered again.

Strange, the power of a question.

Translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier

Translator's Note

Gabriel Preil was a delightful anomaly in modern Jewish literature:

a Hebrew poet who was not an Israeli poet; a Hebrew poet in America;

an American poet in Hebrew. And a Yiddish poet, too: he began to

write in Yiddish and in Hebrew in the same years, the thirties, and

often translated his Yiddish verse into Hebrew. The imagism and the

individualism for which Preil's work became admired were distinctly .

American influences (he translated Frost, Sandburg, and Jeffers into

Hebrew), but he originally discovered them in the "introspectivist"

Yiddish poets of New York. Preil quietly defied the imprisonments of

the ideologies: he thrived in the language of the exile and in the lan-

guage of the homeland, which lived together without bitterness in his

large and delicate spirit. He was the rare twentieth-century Jewish '

writer who rose above the feuds. Preil was born in Estonia in 1911 and

eleven years later emigrated with his mother to New York, where he

lived until his death in 1993. To behold the landscape of New England

in Preil's enchanting Hebrew lyrics is to be reminded again of the

futility of the distinction between the particular and the universal.

Every corner of the world belongs to anyone who will do the work

that is required to possess it.

"The Power of a Question" first appeared in 1985, in Preil's book

Hamishim Shir Bamidbar (Fifty Poems in the Wilderness); and it was

reprinted in 1993 in Asfan Stavim (The Collector of Autumns), Preil's

collected poems from 1972 to 1992, a volume that it is impossible not

to cherish. In Hebrew, the title page of a book is called its gate, in

keeping with the grandeur of the Jewish conception of reading; and

so the sealed title page in the poem's fourth line is in the original a

harsher image of exclusion. The dedication to Irving Howe was added

in the poem's second incarnation. There is no way any longer to verify

whether the question that it gratefully recalls was posed by Howe. It

is a critic's question, or a translator's question, or an editor's question.

The poem was written in the same period in which Howe was work-

ing, with Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk, on The Penguin Book of

Modern Yiddish Verse, published in 1987, and Ilana Weiner Howe

remembers Preil coming to the house to discuss some of his Yiddish

poems that Howe wished to include in the anthology. I prefer to

believe that the saving voice on the telephone was indeed Howe's:

"bright," Preil calls it, which puts me in mind (perhaps because I miss

it so much) of the buoyancy that always returned to Howe's talk

when he left political perplexities for literary ones.

The staleness from which the poet suffers is banished by an inquiry

into his poetics; the tedium of life is relieved by, of all things, a point

of theory. It is wonderful to have this document of the quickening

ofa poet by a critic. For the anti-intellectual way of regarding artistic

creation- most famously articulated in Mallarmé's scolding pro-

nouncement that poems are made of words, not ideas-rather

impoverishes it. Don't artists think? What is so sensually threatening

about a philosophical idea? Even aestheticism is a form of ideation,

though it is not only that. But here is the poet refreshed by the critic -

indeed, restored to his appetite for perception, to the preparedness

for sensation that is the condition of his enterprise. For this reason,

the reader may be as enlivened by the power of the poem as the poet

was by the power of the question. - L.w.