the house - A long poem

Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–92) “ha-bayeet” (the house) is a textured polyglot long-poem that moves between multiple idiolectal slangs and inflections across Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and Aramaic registers, in a haunting chronicle of Zionist urban renewal. Yeshurun’s poetic thinking enacts an ongoing translational event in this work, perpetually in the midst of code-switching as a mode of sociolinguistic and aesthetic rupture. “home tongue / earthquake,” he writes, in the final section of the poem, “sometimes the voice / it’s a / garbage can / & sometimes a / delicate presence.” Language acquisition for Yeshurun, like urban renewal, is somewhere halfway between production and destruction—between the newly built and the already (or soon to be) demolished. The translingual poetics of “ha-bayeet” serves, in these terms, as a (po)ethical imperative to give voice to this destruction, as “an instance of the re- / novated house, that’s still / in mourning holes.”