Nearly every recent critical work on Celia Dropkin focuses on the sexuality in her poems. These essays all share a familiar ring: “fully-loaded,” “erotic energy,” “explicitly sexual.” Indeed, it is inevitable, as her work truly emits a striking erotic and sexual energy.
But “New York at Night by the Banks of the Hudson” stands out from Dropkin’s other work precisely because it avoids her usual eroticisms and does not drill in the “introspectivism” of Di Inzikhistn. Even while lacking the anticipated sexual undertones (or overtones), the imagery here proves equally provocative. She seems to have abandoned the “self” (the “zikh”) in this poem, too absorbed by the very human landscape before her which takes on several dimensions at once: skyscrapers, beehives, and millions of human lives.
Read by Nahma Sandrow
New York at Night by the Banks of the Hudson
ניו-יאָרק בײַ נאַכט בײַ די ברעגן פֿון האָדסאָן
Celia Dropkin
ציליע דראָפּקין
translated by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon
Seeping from the cells of your skyscrapers is golden honey—light through millions of windows, as through cells of gigantic honey-combs, you can see golden honey, human honey, light. Immense bees built their beehives here, a forest of beehives, and filled them until they overflowed with honey, human honey—light. The Hudson at night is black as pitch, and the honey flows and swallows the pitch on the banks of New York. * * * These amazing trees with golden fruit, a forest of golden fruit, gigantic cedars hung with lanterns.
Born on December 5, 1887, in Bobruisk, White Russia, Dropkin began writing poetry at the age of ten—in Russian. Only in 1917, five years after moving to New York, did she finally translate a few of her poems into Yiddish and only in 1920 did she begin writing in Yiddish. She received an early Jewish and secular education, and afterwards attended a gymnasium in Novosybko.
She died in 1956 with only one book to her name, but with great acclaim and admiration and as an influential member of Di Inzikhistn.
