ABSTRACT
Some scattered prose fragments found among Hayyim Nahman Bialik's literary remains deal with a young man called Shmulik, the very name of the hero of Random Harvest. Although Random Harvest contains some autobiographical elements, it is a fictionalized autobiography. Random Harvest is a brilliant unfinished poem in prose written at the height of Bialik's career. The translators have tried to convey something of the magic of the original Hebrew. The Hebrew title Bialik gave to this work is Safiah, a biblical term designating the aftergrowth of random fruits and vegetables following the Sabbatical year—hence our title Random Harvest. Bialik refers briefly to the village pond that became a recurrent motif in his poetry and to which he devoted his long poem "The Pond." For some, relying on Bialik's autobiographical letter to Joseph Klausner, it represents the mind or soul of the artist, which converts the illusory reality of the world into a truly metaphysical or aesthetic reality.
