(a song of steps)

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The two halves of Psalm 129— four verses of oppression, four of enemies undone—cohere by their defiance and imagination. They hold together, too, by perfective verbs in the third-person plural: “they,” and what they have and will not have done.

An us-against-them psalm, it begins by borrowing pathos from the first-person singular, though it clearly intends a collective meaning. “They’ve choked me so | since childhood,” the psalm starts, but immediately turns to stage direction: “let Israel | now say” (1). Even the verb translated here (after much revision: not “harried” nor “hurt,” not “squeezed” nor “crushed”) as “choked” is as much collectively experienced as it is personally felt, tseraruni indicating the kind of cordoning and constriction associated with siege, to be besieged, hemmed in from all sides. Likewise the tilling and plowing of verse 3 are deep cuts made “on my back,” a striking image of damage that is as much the body of the land as an individual’s scars, a map of flesh. The first-person disappears from the middle of the psalm, only to reappear in the plural in the final line, “we bless you | in the name of the Lord” (8c), a phrase that those who have passed by Zion’s enemies have left unsaid.

It is the third-person plural that remains consistent throughout the poem. They may have choked me, but they “haven’t stopped me” (2b). They, “the tillers | tilled” (3a); they lengthened their furrows (3b). In a sudden switch to the imperfect form in verse 5, the collective speaker of the psalm wishes that they might “blench | and flinch” (5a), they “who hate | Zion” (5b). And, in the psalm’s most blurry sequence, it is they who “are like the grass | of rooftops” (6) and another they “who pass them by” who have not said words of blessing to the first “them.” They and they run together, the besiegers of verses 1 and 2 who seem to be the tillers and rogues of verses 3 and 4, as well as the haters of Zion of verse 5, who are passed over by a second they, travelers who seem neutral at the start of verse 8 before becoming “we,” a not-them they so doubly negated they are almost the voice of the start of the psalm. What the passersby have not said, in other words, is what “we” would say to ourselves and each other.          

Most important to the meaning of the poem are the verb forms, which present most of the action of the psalm as complete. The traumas of Israel’s past, which are one with the speaker’s bodily harm, as well as the determined line “and yet | haven’t stopped me” (2b) and the Lord’s intervention, “has slit the ropes | of rogues” (4b) are best translated by the present perfect. They have happened. The second part of verse 6 begins a second sequence of perfective-form verbs as the psalm imagines what has not happened. The grass on the roof has not grown, “and so has not filled | a mower’s palm / let alone the arms | of a gleaner” (7). Passersby have not said words of blessing. Only at the beginning, middle, and end of the psalm do imperfect or jussive verbs appear. In the middle, the psalm wishes— “May they blench | and flinch” (5a)—and either wishes or conjures: “They are like the grass,” which could also be “May they be like the grass,” to much the same effect (6a). At the beginning and end, the verbs are liturgical, pointing the poem to the present tense of the reciter’s experience: “let Israel | now say” (1b) and “we bless you | in the name of the Lord” (8c). The reader gets to take part in the same blessing that has simultaneously been withheld from them.