I’m awaiting an ordered copy of Louis Zukofsky’s poem A. In the meantime, I was reading his Wikipedia page. There, I spotted mention of how
“The final lines of [another poem] Autobiography express Zukofsky’s fear of permanent alienation from his upbringing and tradition as a bitter triumph of successful assimilation: ‘Keine Kadish wird man sagen’. The lines are a variation on lines from Heinrich Heine’s poem Gedächtnisfeier [Memorial]: ‘Keine Messe wird man singen, / Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen, / Nichts gesagt und nichts gesungen / Wird an meinen Sterbetagen’. (‘No Mass will anyone sing / Neither Kaddish will anyone say, / Nothing will be said and nothing sung / On my dying days’)”
That Heine poem is quite interesting. Looking around for a translation, I found that Martin Greenberg’s had been published in the New Criterion in 1993. Here is an excerpt:
| Keine Messe wird man singen, Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen, Nichts gesagt und nichts gesungen Wird an meinen Sterbetagen. Doch vielleicht an solchem Tage, Mit dem Kranz von Immortellen |
No mass will be sung for me, No Kaddish recited either, Nothing said and nothing sung When I depart forever But maybe on a morning when With a bunch of immortelles clutched in |