Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

A Maccabee Among Translators

The great poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) also produced translations that helped re-energize Modern Hebrew. Bialik’s renditions of Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama “Wilhelm Tell” and Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” are examples, as detailed in “The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937.”

Yet Bialik’s “Quixote” was unfaithful to the original, according to an essay by Marianna Prigozhina. Working from an abridged Russian translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece — he could not read Spanish — Bialik cut the novel by over one-half, removing dozens of chapters. Still, he deeply admired the original. In a letter to a friend, Bialik stated: “I read this humorous masterpiece [“Don Quixote”] in Russian when I first came to Odessa as a teenage yeshiva boy, trying to become a poet. I was living in poverty in Odessa, and the book had enthralled me… Dostoyevsky made me weep and Cervantes made me laugh. I alternated between laughing and crying.”

Even so, as Prigozhina explains, the laughter is left out of Bialik’s abridgment, whose highly serious protagonist is a “man of the book.” By presenting a self-portrait of Quixote as a tragic hero, Bialik presented what Prigozhina calls an “exquisite judaization of a foreign classic.” In it, the servant Sancho Panza vows to obey his master “as well as he observes Shabbat.” Panza further swears by “Elohim” and worries about getting tossed in jail until the “return of Elijah (Eliyahu),” all expressions not in Cervantes. No less idealistic and redolent of Yiddishkeit was Bialik’s translation of Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell,” as an essay by Anat Feinberg in “The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture” reminds us. In a memoir, Bialik’s widow Mania recalled that he translated Schiller’s Swiss nationalist play in Odessa during the Russian civil war, and one night Bialik paused in his labors and suddenly cried: “I want to go to Eretz Israel!”

The critic Ya‘akov Fichmann observed that Bialik’s version of Schiller, which adds allusions to the blinding of Samson and the siege of Jericho, imitates biblical syntax so closely that the “Orient triumphed over the Occident.” Yet Schiller’s call for freedom resonated with Jewish readers who saw Wilhelm Tell and his cohorts as folkloric versions of the Maccabees. In a 1909 letter Bialik, a sort of Maccabee among translators, termed a good translation an “artistic act more complicated than an act of composition…a good translator has to be first of all a complete artist.” This Bialik certainly was.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.