The Chanson Internationale (‘International Song’) was originally written in 1871 by Eugène Pottier, a French public transportation worker, member of the International Workingmen’s Association (The First International), and activist of the Paris Commune. He wrote it to pay tribute to the commune violently destroyed that year. The song became the official anthem of The Second International, of the Comintem, and between 1921 and 1944 also of the Soviet Union. Most socialist and communist parties adopted it as their anthem during the last decades of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, adapting it in local languages (Russian, Yiddish, etc.) to their particular ideological framework. Several stanzas of the anthem were first translated into Hebrew by Avraham Shlonsky in 1921. As Ron Kuzar explains,^[10] Ron Kuzar, “Translating the Internationale: unity and dissent in the encoding of proletarian solidarity” in Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 87-109. 

This is the only version [of the Internationale] that every Jewish Israeli has been singing in Hebrew, regardless of exact political affiliation. Shlonsky was an important poet of Labor-Zionism, the stream of Zionism which was becoming hegemonic in Palestine from the 1920s holding this power through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and till 1977. Striving to foster a Jewish national entity in Palestine, Labor-Zionism was guided by the principle of Constructive Socialism, which advocated selective postponement of class struggle during the phases of nation-building, partly substituting class struggle with cooperation with capital invested in a productive national spirit, especially when carried out under the auspices of the organizational and political power of Labor-Zionism (Horowitz and Lissak, 1977: 187, 203-207) (see Fig. 1). Its objective was to build a national economy which ascribed priority and channeled funds to the creation of employment opportunities for the Jewish workers and to the settlement of Jews in the country’s frontiers in several types of cooperative communities.

Labor Zionism had different political streams in it, ranging from social democracy to radical Marxism, but on the whole, it did not deny – at least in its earlier phases – the socialist revolutionary tradition. During 1921-1922, Shlonsky was a member of the Labor Legion, the first countrywide organization of Jewish workers’ communes in Palestine, which undertook road paving, stone mining and cutting, house construction, and other hard labor jobs. The Legion was formed in the Valley of Yizre’el, and later spread to other parts of the country. Shlonsky viewed himself as a “road paving poet” ([1927] 1961: 165), a binomial definition which embodies his insistence on the professionality of the poet, albeit combined with a personal involvement in physical labor. Before the 1920s, “the ideological attitude towards literary production that expressed labor life, especially when written by the workers themselves, involved also a moratorium on aesthetic judgment. The mechanism of acceptance sometimes simply evaded literary evaluation according to established norms, which were otherwise applied to literature” (Hever, 1994: 75), in order to enhance a literary production in Hebrew, which lauded the Zionist project and praised its agents.

Shlonsky had come to Palestine equipped with an avant-garde modernism which declined to accept one-sided writing, preferring to stand at the forefront of political involvement and debate. During the two years of his membership in the Labor Legion, Shlonsky was not yet able to materialize the independence of a professional poet in his own life; this started to happen only when he moved to Tel-Aviv in 1922. But his insistence on quality, on the expression of the personal angle, and on the right to culturally intervene, not only to collectively reflect, was part of the European modernism that he imported. To be sure, “the dichotomy [between the traditional and the modernist literary viewpoints] was not between mobilized versus unmobilized literature, but between more principled intellectual commitments, which would materialize in the different literary structures emanating from them” (Hever, 1994: 71).

In a later autobiographical text, Shlonsky recounts that already while in the Labor Legion he had a literary dialogue with “my secret readers” on “old and new in poetry, on necessary transformation in contents and forms”. It was this small group that “‘ordered’ from me the translation of the Internationale, for the first celebration of the First of May in the Valley of Yizre’el” ([1954] 1964: 895). Shlonsky faced the need to deal with the tension between preserving, on the one hand, the principled socialist heritage of class struggle and international solidarity of all workers, and on the other hand provisionally suspending it under the local conditions of nation building and national solidarity. The Arab worker, with whom the Labor Legion was competing for employment opportunities, was both a canditate for class solidarity and a challenger of the emergent separate Jewish national economy.

The text of Shlonsky’s translation found here is as found elsewhere, in Hebrew Wikipedia and in Zemereshet. (I haven’t yet been able to locate the source for the additional two stanzas given for Shlonsky.) The English translation of Shlonsky’s first stanza of the Internationale was made by Ron Kuzar, to which I have made a few small changes for the sake of a smoother reading. I have also added translations for the remaining two stanzas. Please leave a comment below, or by contact us, if you feel anything needs correction or improvement. –Aharon Varady

Recordings

“הָאִינְטֶרְנַצְיוֹנָל | the Internationale, by Eugène Pottier (1871); Hebrew translation by Avraham Shlonsky (1921)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Aharon N. Varady (translation)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer translator for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his translations, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot Naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also transcribes prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes for the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Ron Kuzar (translation)

Ron Kuzar is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English, University of Haifa. His main interests are English and Hebrew syntax and language and ideology.

Avraham Shlonsky (translation)

Avraham Shlonsky (March 6, 1900 – May 18, 1973; Hebrew: אברהם שלונסקי; Russian: Авраам Шлёнский) was a Ukrainian Jew born in the Russian Empire who became a significant and dynamic Israeli poet. He was influential in the development of modern Hebrew and its literature in Israel through his many acclaimed translations of literary classics, particularly from Russian, as well as his own original Hebrew children's classics. Known for his humor, Shlonsky earned the nickname "Lashonsky" from the wisecrackers of his generation (lashon means "tongue", i.e., "language") for his unusually clever and astute innovations in the newly evolving Hebrew language.

Eugène Edine Pottier

Eugène Edine Pottier (4 October 1816 – 6 November 1887) was a French revolutionary, socialist, poet, freemason and transport worker. Pottier was elected a member of the Paris municipal council - the Paris Commune, in March 1871. Following the Commune's defeat, in June 1871 he wrote the poem L'Internationale, which became the International Workingmen's Association anthem during its last years (1871–1876), and has been used by most socialist and left-wing political internationals since. Music was later written for the song by Pierre De Geyter. Encyclopedia of Mass Persuasion deems the anthem "one of the best-known propaganda songs since La Marseillaise". After writing the poem, Pottier went into exile but later returned to France, dying penniless.

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17

Works of related interest:

 

לה מרסֵיֶיז | La Marseillaise, by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1792); Hebrew translation by Efrayim Dror (ca. 1940)

זֶה הֶעָפָר הָיָה פַּעַם הָאִישׁ | This Dust was Once the Man, an elegy for President Abraham Lincoln by Walt Whitman (1871), Hebrew translation by Shimon Halkin (1952)

The City of Light, a poem by Felix Adler (1882)

שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם | Shalom Aleikhem, the piyyut for Friday evenings in German translation by Franz Rosenzweig (1921)

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