Ginsbergs „Kaddish“ im Theater

The Habimah National Theater of Israel is visiting the United States for the first time in 40 years, with a four-day run (it ends tomorrow) at Symphony Space. It brings theatrical intelligence and moments of real power to „Kaddish L’Naomi,“ its staging of Allen Ginsberg’s a gorgeous lamentation for his dead, mad mother.

The poem, whose title is the same as that of the Jewish prayer for the dead, begins:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after — And read Adonais‘ last triumphant stanzas aloud — wept, realizing how we suffer —
And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers — and my own imagination of a withered leaf — at dawn —
Dreaming back thru life, Your time — and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,
the final moment — the flower burning in the Day — and what comes after . . .

There is so much in this 1956 poem: the Bible, Whitman, Blake, the ancient sound of Aramaic (Kaddish is said in Aramaic) and the modern rhythm of bop. / NYT 20.9.03