Poetics, ethics and aestethics in ode tsu der toyb, by Abraham Sutskever

Abstract

Abraham Sutskever (1913-2010) was one of the most important yiddish poets of the 20th century. His work is noted for the formal precision and a fascination with nature. From the holocaust on, though, this exists side by side with a testimonial character from which the poet finds himself unable to escape. It is in ode tsu der toyb, a poem from 1955, that the conflict between these two aspects of his work eaches its peak: the poet will recover images from older poems, using perfect neoclassical verses, raising, at the same time, lots of questions about the role of the poet when facing history. The aim of this work is to briefly read this questions and the answers the poet found, and relate them to this later work