Yiddish Jewish poetry

Yiddish Jewish Poetry

1. The role of Yiddish poetry in the history of the development of Yiddish Jewish culture

The creative scope of modern Yiddish poetry Extremely broad. It includes all themes and techniques in European and American literature; and produces a unique cosmopolitan character from the vast geographical conditions of Jewish readers across five continents. However, in its prehistoric and posthistoric development process of nearly a thousand years, it is only in the last two or three generations that Yiddish poetry has such a prosperous scene that transcends various constraints and limitations. In the development process of the traditional Yiddish Jewish culture-Azhuken Nazim culture, people concentrated on constantly new interpretations of the essence of the Talmud according to the changing living conditions, thus neglecting literary and artistic creation. "Literature" in the Western sense was considered unimportant; therefore, Jewish poetry (including Yiddish poetry and Hebrew poetry), despite its diverse and colorful development, remained in a state of neglect. status. By the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, the Jews in Eastern Europe had experienced a series of revolutionary upheavals—urbanization, industrialization, inward and outward migration, the rise of political organizations and the development of civil emancipation, as well as the widespread secularization and secularization of Jewish culture. Complete Europeanization. With the occurrence and development of these turmoils, Jewish poetry—including Yiddish poetry and Hebrew poetry—also developed into the pinnacle of Jewish culture. A large number of talented people who in the past would have gone to other jobs are now attracted to the poetry world. Jewish poets and readers were increasingly influenced by outside poetry, and Jewish poetry finally caught up with the level of European development. Khrushchevsky commented that Yiddish poetry "achieved a great leap and reached the level of Europe in the 20th century." Because of its rapidity, and because it was at a stage of stylistically fluid development, Yiddish poetry failed to develop a canonical form of its own, but only had some very rough outlines of characteristics. However, poets naturally followed a common norm of European poetry. Even Yiddish poetry, which quotes a lot of traditional Jewish cultural allusions, undoubtedly has the typical characteristics of modern European and American poetry and has become an integral part of modern European and American poetry. As Reyeris pointed out: "The poetry of our generation originated from the East but flowed into the West. Whether we inherit the tradition of Jacob, the Hebrew ancestor, or learn the style of Raben, the originator of modern expressionist dance in the West, our poetry is always It is a fusion of Eastern and Western cultures. ”

2. Yiddish poetry before the 19th century

The earliest Yiddish literary works have been lost. But contemporaneous historical sources related to these literary works and the high degree of poetic writing skills shown in the earliest recently discovered poem (composed in 1382) indicate something about Yiddish poetry during the hundreds of years of prehistory. Poetry played a major role in Yiddish literature before the 19th century. The language used in poetry at that time was mainly a Yiddish idiom based on various Western Yiddish dialects. This idiom was used as the Yiddish standard language in Western Europe until 1800, and was then replaced by another Yiddish standard language based on Yiddish dialects in Eastern Europe. Due to the influence of the German poetic tradition in the Middle Ages and the deliberate literal translation of the Bible in many languages, the literary language style of Yiddish is very elegant, but cannot be directly connected with the oral language of Yiddish at that time. Many of the early Yiddish poems were recited and performed by professional bards or amateurs. Even after the introduction of printing, each published poem often indicated at the beginning or at the end the mode in which it was to be recited. Revised versions of the Yiddish epic appeared in the 14th and 15th centuries. In terms of content, these epics include traditional European themes (such as heroic stories of King Arthur and Gadren) and "Old Testament" themes (such as stories of Samuel, Isaac, etc.). In terms of form, they adopt stricter rhythm and long lines. The rhyme pattern of stanzas and xaxa, xbxb. The complex and incisive Italian eight-line style (abababcc rhyme pattern) first appeared in two verse novels written by Elie Burke (d. 1549), which were influenced by Italian poetry. It can be seen that the introduction of Italian octaline to Yiddish poetry was more than a century earlier than the introduction of German poetry. It can also be said that the Yiddish poet Elie Burkle was the first poet in the European poetry world to use iambic accent meter.

With the disappearance of the bards, the meter of Yiddish poetry also became irregular. Later, the number of syllables contained in each musical beat also became very different, and sometimes the number of syllables in one beat was even large. This situation is clearly reflected not only in the collection of folk songs of the 16th and 17th centuries, but also in religious lyric poetry, poetic chronicles, nostalgic elegy, satirical poetry and ethical poetry. From this we can conclude that early modern Yiddish poetry is very similar to most contemporary German poetry in its free use of meter.