The following two poems, written by Emmauel Moses and translated by poet Marilyn Hacker, were first published in Modern Poetry in Review, No. 2, 2013.
A prelude (literally ‘before the play’) is a brief musical composition that is played before the main piece.
Preludes aim to capture small things or themes, and they tend to be short. Sometimes people think of them as thresholds, or entryways into the action of the longer piece.
As a form, preludes may even be written as practice pieces or exercises for performers—they tend to be shorter, and to explore a particular sound or element of composition. You can learn a lot about a composer by listening to their early preludes—and comparing them to later preludes.
When reading a poem that borrows this prelude as form, one might consider what ground or terrain is being staked out—who is the speaker, and what is the subject?
In addition to writing poetry and novels, Emmauel Moses translated writing from Hebrew, German, and English, and his father, Stephane Moses, was a noted philosopher and historian of Judaism.
Here is Moses’ “Prelude 4” as translated by Marilyn Hacker.
We did not ask to be born
to cross the first threshold
There is no punctuation here to mark the stopping points, or to delineate one image and thought from another.
In her translation notes, Marilyn Hacker emphasizes the relationship between history and music in Emmauel Moses' poems.
These poem are translated from Emmanuel Moses' book, Preludes and Fugues, which Hacker describes as "seven sequences of eight paired poems in which the second of each pair can be read as a fugal variation on the themes set out in the first."
Here is the fugal variation on the earlier prelude.
The references aren't always identified in Moses' poems—there are cathedrals, landscape paintings, city streets—and the reader senses them indirectly through the fleshing out of context, almost like learning to read, where you glean the meaning of a new word from what surrounds it. This indirect description is an interesting poetic strategy in Moses' work.
The speaker keeps moving—motion is a mode of questioning, of revisiting and reviewing—life in the shadow of the legible past. And the past is read into buildings, objects, and scenes—these function almost like texts here.
Hacker mentions how the speaker seems to be "an actor in one or a multiplicity of pasts." I think the fugue form aligns this polytonality, this sense of multiplicity, with the poet's intention.
The strange temporality of the speaker, and the "out of epoch"quality of these poems reminded Hacker of Jean-Paul de Dadelson's monologues in the persona of Bach and Marguerite Yourcenar's L'oevre au noir, with its jaded humanist scientist.
Who is "I" given the past, given the socialization, given the ways of being that shape us in the world? What does it mean to be out of one's time, and how does this correlate with being of all times, somehow?