"Bystander Angel, He Records the Dying'

My late-life swerve away from novels to short stories continues. It’s a humbling admission but I’m unlikely to read Proust for a third time. The shorter form is ideally adapted to my circadian rhythms. I can read two or three before going to bed. Of late, the masters: Chekhov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and Isaac Babel. 

Now we have a Babel for our age and I’m rereading him – Boris Dralyuk’s translations of Red Cavalry (2014), Odessa Stories (2016) and Of Sunshine and Bedbugs: Essential Stories (2022), all published by Pushkin Press. The third volume is a selection of stories from the first two plus a new one, “Guy de Maupassant,” one of Babel’s finest, containing his best-known line: “No iron penetrates the human heart as icily as a period placed at just the right moment.”  

 

In 2004, the Scottish Poetry Library asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books, and this is how he answered, in part:

 

“Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel’s stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.”

 

Even in translation, Babel’s language is rich. Not to mention his stories as stories – the violence, the tension of a Jew riding with Cossacks, moral ambiguities. Only recently did I happen on a poem by the English poet Elaine Feinstein (1930-2019), "Isaac Babel Riding with Budyonny," which takes its title from the 1962 painting by R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007). Budyonny was Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, the cavalry commander during the Polish-Soviet War. Babel rode with him. Budyonny later expressed outrage over Babel’s “crude, deliberate and arrogant slander.” Feinstein writes:

 

“The Whites have already trashed the shtetl.

        Babel rides with the Red Cavalry,

shamed by their courage, though they loot and kill.

        Bystander angel, he records the dying.”