Shira

Agnon’s Shira: A Translator’s Afterthoughts Zeva Shapiro

S. Y. Agnon’s romantic novel, Shira, is an ode to Jerusalem, understated in its tone, complex in its structure, overwhelming in its lyric sweep. When the initial chapters appeared, intermittently in the literary journals of the early 1940s and ‘50s, readers reveled in the fun of identifying the prominent public figures who served as models for many of Agnon’s thinly disguised characters. In the 1970s when the novel was published, posthumously, critics were challenged by the task of decoding the message and dealing with the ambiguous conclusion of the Nobel laureate’s final work.

The novel unfolds on several levels through characters whose actions are ordinary, though weighted with an awareness of motives and alternatives. The actions and thought processes of the central figures — Manfred Herbst, a professor of Byzantine history who is on the brink of middle age; his wife Henrietta, who is more interested in her family, household, social conscience, then in meeting her husband’s needs; Shira, the arrogant nurse with whom Herbst has an affair and, to his dismay, becomes passionately entangled — have an insistently comic dimension that moves Agnon’s painstakingly detailed accounts of an action or thought process beyond the obsessive to the realm of the absurd.

In Shira Agnon writes, at last, about his own time and place: Palestine in the period of the British Mandate, with the Holocaust casting its shadow on the mechanics of life, personal modes, political options. Agnon’s prose is relatively free of nostalgia and pietism, providing wry descriptions of academia, the religious community, political responses ranging from the innocent to the militant, describing a context that one recognizes all too well to this day. Though the narrative line of the novel is rather loose, Agnon’s distinctive prose embodies a very special realm where thought and feeling meet, a powerful and fascinating integral logic that engages the reader and evokes endlessly new meanings from what might otherwise be considered the trivia of everyday life and consciousness.

When I began to discover intimations of Agnon in the events of my own daily life, I realized that he had entered my world just as I had entered his. I began to flow with the text, and Shira (the women at the romantic center of this novel, whose name means poetry/song in Hebrew) was transformed from a fiercely pragmatic figure to a sensual evocation of King Solomon’s beloved. Herbst’s often frantic rambles through modern Jerusalem were enriched by the resonance of familiar verses: “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love — I must rise and roam the town, in the streets and squares I must seek the one I love.” There are more pointed references to the Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim in Hebrew) throughout the novel — so that for me King Solomon’s passion inhabits its core. In a crucial scene, toward the end of the novel, Herbst regards a painting of a leper “with panic in his eyes and desire in his heart,” a phrase that echoes Herbst’s tortured relation to Shira and will, undoubtedly resonate even for the common reader who will not make the leap to the verse in Chronicles I, wherein David informs the people that the Lord has chosen Solomon to build the Temple, rejecting David because of the bloody consequences of his affair with Bathsheba.

Books I and II of Shira both end with dreams. In a dramatic segment that has the intensity of a gripping nightmare (included as “Final Chapter” at the end of the English-language edition), Herbst finds Shira in a leper colony and decides to stay with her there. Emuna Yaron, Agnon’s daughter and dedicated editor, whose notes are a primary source in our attempt to reconstruct Agnon’s design for this book, provides the following information: “This chapter, which belongs after Book III, was meant to be the conclusion of the book, but Agnon removed it and began writing Book IV.” In fact, this segment, with its bizarre dream-like syntax, seems to fit between Chapters 18 and 19, near the end of Book III, where it is consistent with the lurid surreal mode of the ongoing text. Chapter 19 begins with a reference to a dream, somewhat distinct from the visions that plagued Herbst in the preceding chapter. And Agnon himself almost seems to be addressing problems of chronology arising from this placement (the baby, to whom Shira refers in these pages is not actually born until the final chapter of Book III, some 25 pages later), when he remarks: “I will relay something that becomes relevant later on. Why advance the sequence now? Because what follows cannot be interrupted.”

Chapters 14 and 15 of Book III, which deal with Herbst’s pursuit of the book collections and his encounter with the painting of the leper, were also, at some point, taken out of the book. But Emuna Yaron reports that when she asked her father for guidance about them she was instructed to put them back in. She mentions that the text, from Chapter 16 on, was found in binders marked “Shira III” and “Shira IV”, a fact that adds to the speculation about Agnon’s motives in removing material from the body of Shira and reinforces the impression that the manuscript remained in a somewhat fluid state. While this information does little to clarify Agnon’s ultimate scheme, it does suggest ambivalence about the place of leprosy in the novel.

Again, from Emuna Yaron’s notes: “While my father was writing Shira, he was also writing the story ‘Ad Olam’ (Forevermore). After Shira was published, Rafi Weiser, of the Agnon Archive, discovered on a particular page of the manuscript just how ‘Ad Olam’ connects with Shira, i.e. somewhere along the line ‘Ad Olam’ was pulled out of Shira and became a story on its own. In ‘Ad Olam’ the scholar Adiel Amza enters the leper colony and doesn’t ever leave it. This may be the reason, or one of the reasons, why my father no longer used this subject in his book Shira.”

Herbst’s own decision within the text of Shira, to abandon the tragedy he was writing about Basileus, the devoted leprous servant, may echo the decision not to include the ‘Ad Olam’ episode in Shira, to withdraw the subject of leprosy form a central position in the novel; and use it as the core of a freestanding story instead. (Could the tale of Ludmilla the nurse, which Agnon promises to tell at the end of Chapter 7 of Book iv, but which never materializes be related to the tale that became ‘Ad Olam’?) Critics who, nonetheless, consider the reunion of Herbst with Shira in the leper colony as the correct conclusion of the novel point the narrative, the characters, and ultimately, the entire thrust of Shira in the direction of pathology and death.

I, myself, choose to take Agnon at his word: “I will show you Manfred Herbst. I won’t show you Shira, whose tracks have not been uncovered, whose whereabouts remain unknown.” In this connection, it is interesting to refer to the last paragraph of Agnon’s novel A Simple Story, which suggests a distinction between “ending” and “closure” that could be applied to Shira too: “The tale of Hirsh and the tale of Mina are over. But Bluma’s tale is not over. What happened to Bluma Nacht is a book in itself. As for Getzel Stein, whom we mentioned rather casually, as well as all the others in our simple story, how much ink will we spill, how many pens will we break to write their tale. God in heaven knows when.” (Translation mine.)

In both A Simple Story and Shira, the narrator, fate’s trusted accomplice, implies that there is unfinished business to be transacted, more knots to be tied or untied. In the case of Shira, where the ending has more finality but is less fully resolved than A Simple Story, the reader who allows himself to drift into the rich and perplexing world of Manfred Herbst will be drawn into the process of finding closure within the book’s abrupt and fragmentary conclusion.

Throughout the final chapters of Shira, Herbst seems on the verge of confession, and there are repeated intimations that Henrietta suspects he is having an affair, either through her own canniness or because Herbst is so transparent. Herbst’s confession to Henrietta (in “Another Version,” which follows “Final Chapter” at the end of the English-language edition), and her characteristically laconic response as she refuses to either blame or absolve him, leave her with the upper hand, depriving him of dramatic confrontation that might feed his thwarted sense of self. (Three babies — Sarah, Dan, Gabi — have been born in the course of Shira. Henrietta’s condescension when Herbst makes his confession all but transforms him into another rather pathetic baby.) There are many indications that Agnon would have, eventually, amplified Book IV, leaving its substance essentially unchanged, that he would have incorporated key elements of “Another Version” to support, rather than alter, the final segment. The recurring verse — “flesh such as yours will not soon be forgotten” (a slight but not insignificant departure from the poet Sh. Shalom’s “cannot be forgotten”) may also serve to underline this ending rather than the one Agnon wrote earlier and discarded, in which Herbst and Shira are reunited in the leper colony.

Critics have added a great deal to our appreciation of Agnon’s mind, of the complex network of intellect, culture, and sensibility that is embodied in the text of Shira; ordinary readers, on the other hand, have responded to the novel’s immediate emotional and psychological power, contemplating its “ideas” as secondary gain. It is ironic that Agnon, whose art defies and deplores pedantic analysis, who parodied the academic establishment so effectively in Shira and elsewhere, has been appropriated by admirers who engage in elaborate attempts to decode and analyze rather than risk immersing themselves in the pleasures of this elusive and unpredictable text. Highlighting the “message” of Shira at the expense of its novelistic art, reducing the character of Shira herself to metaphor in an attempt to extract philosophical magnitude and impose conformity on this unconventional, yet thoroughly accessible, novel deprives it of a far more essential dimension.

Shira can, nonetheless, be read on countless levels. Generations have read the Song of Songs as an allegory, redeeming the erotic through the metaphysical. This remains a possible approach to Shira and even addresses the modern reader’s need for clear and consistent character profiles. Our reading of Shira is certainly enhanced by those critics who explore and alert us to the art, literature, philosophy, view of history that informed Agnon’s cultural and historical landscape. Still, it seems appropriate to invoke Shira’s own view of criticism: “I don’t think I would enjoy being a prophet and saying this or that is what the poet had in mind”; and “Why read books about books…if I can read the poems themselves, why bother with the critics’ opinions.” Though Herbst argues: “True, but they might reveal meanings you wouldn’t be aware of on your own,” she insists on her position; “Since my teeth grew in I’ve been in the habit of chewing my own food…From the day I learned to read, I read without inviting critics and essayists to chew the words of the storytellers or poets beforehand and thrust the results into my mouth.”

As a translator, I felt myself being submerged by the text, yielding to the particular words, the exquisite blend of austerity and lyricism, resisting the temptation to distance myself from them in order to analyze, interpret, and rephrase “correctly.” Going beyond the discursive level,

I found myself inside the text, where ordinary dilemmas seemed to resolve themselves. What on the surface had seemed like ambivalence became an ability to accommodate at least two sides of a question, what had seemed like random digression was justified in terms of the language of the unconscious. Agnon’s voice was able to modulate shifts from thought and feeling to action, from ruminative material to narrative material. The firm structure of each phrase, sentence, paragraph, made questions about the overall structure of this unfinished novel seem somewhat irrelevant, though its ambiguous conclusion leaves so many unanswered questions. It was my experience, as I worked closely with the text that apparent trouble spots yielded the greatest meaning, as is often the case with aspects of a dream that resist interpretation.

Despite his reputation as a formidable and esoteric writer, Agnon’s meanings are simple once one concedes the limitations of the rational mode. His emphasis on experience rather than outcome make the novel deeply involving, though so little actually happens in the course of it. Herbst’s somewhat quirky character is at peace with the contending aspects of reality, accommodates a broad range of feelings, transcends a dramatic view of personality as a network of conflicting forces coming to terms with each other to achieve consistency. Having discarded the chapter in which Herbst finds Shira. Agnon chose to have him continue the quest and, despite her physical absence in Books III and IV, Shira remains a powerfully persistent presence: “He was even more keenly aware of what did not occur between them… as if what did not occur was the essence. And, that being what he lacked, he would be keenly aware of this lack forever.”

Herbst remains bound to Shira, like the aguna — a wife who, in Jewish law, remains bound to her absent mate as long as his whereabouts are unknown. This concept, from which Agnon derived his name in 1908 (having been born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes), haunts his writing from early on. Though, practically speaking, the plight of the aguna has been highly problematic, even tragic, it is true that those forces and presences that vanish mysteriously are the ones from which it is most difficult to find release. Imagination, experience, emotion — all conspire to create bonds that are not easily dissolved, bonds that Agnon examines repeatedly.

In an early story, “Agunot,” the thwarted bond of passion wreaks havoc in many lives; in the novel A Guest For The Night, the narrator returns to his Galician town, which remains bonded to the past — at once a constricting force and a vital framework within which character and feeling unfold; in Shira, Herbst remains bonded to the mysterious women who challenges so many aspects of his identity. Whether or not it is rational for such bonds to exist, Agnon acknowledges their power, illuminating them with particular brilliance in Shira, wherein his vision derives less from the urge to judge and proclaim values than from a commitment to what is essentially true and human.