by Chana Bloch
THE SELECTED POETRY OF YEHUDA AMICHAI
LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE EAST
a series of fiction, poetry, and memoirs in translation
Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
by Nawal El Saadawi
translated by Marilyn Booth
Arabic Short Stories
translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
The Innocence of the Devil
by Nawal El Saadawi
translated by Sherif Hetata
Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982
by Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Ibrahim Muhawi
Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery
by Bahaa’ Taher
translated by Barbara Romaine
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
newly revised and expanded edition
translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
The Selected Poetry of Dan Pagis
translated by Stephen Mitchell
THE SELECTED POETRY OF
YEHUDA AMICHAI
Edited and Translated from the Hebrew by
CHANA BLOCH AND STEPHEN MITCHELL
With a New Foreword by C. K. Williams
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
The poems in this collection were originally published in Hebrew.
Some of these translations have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Berkeley Monthly, Crosscurrents, Delos, Field, Ironwood, Judaism, Midstream, Mississippi Review, The Nation, New Letters, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Present Tense, Quarry West, Shenandoah, Threepenny Review, Tikkun, Translation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Zyzzyva, as well as in the anthologies Voices within the Ark, edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf (Avon, 1980), Without a Single Answer, edited by Elaine Starkman and Leah Schweitzer (Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1990), and Literary Olympians 1992, edited by Elizabeth Bartlett (Ford-Brown, 1992).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Ingram Merrill Foundation and to the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for their financial assistance.
The hardcover first edition of this book was published in 1986 by Harper & Row, Publishers; First California edition published 1996.
© 1986, 1996, 2013 by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
ISBN: 978-0-520-27583-6
eISBN: 9780520954441
Amichai, Yehuda.
[Poems. English. Selections]
The selected poetry of Yehuda Amichai / edited and translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. — Newly rev. and expanded ed.
p. cm. — (Literature of the Middle East)
Previously published: New York : HarperCollins, 1992.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-520-20538-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Amichai, Yehuda—Translations into English. I. Bloch, Chana, 1940- . II. Mitchell, Stephen, 1943- III. Title. IV. Series.
PJ5054.A65A2 1996
892.4’16 — dc2096-18580
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.
Contents
Foreword 2013 by C. K. Williams
Foreword 1996 by Chana Bloch
PART ONE
edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell
From Now and in Other Days (1955)
God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children
The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House in Jerusalem
Autobiography, 1952
The Smell of Gasoline Ascends in My Nose
Six Poems for Tamar
Yehuda Ha-Levi
Ibn Gabirol
When I Was a Child
Look: Thoughts and Dreams
From We Loved Here
From Two Hopes Away (1958)
God’s Hand in the World
Sort of an Apocalypse
And That Is Your Glory
Of Three or Four in a Room
Not Like a Cypress
Through Two Points Only One Straight Line Can Pass
Half the People in the World
For My Birthday
Two Photographs
Poems for a Woman
Children’s Procession
Ballad of the Washed Hair
Sonnet from the Voyage
The Visit of the Queen of Sheba
From In a Right Angle: A Cycle of Quatrains
From Poems, 1948-1962
As for the World
In the Middle of This Century
Farewell
Such as Sorrow
Jerusalem
Before
And as Far as Abu Ghosh
You Too Got Tired
The Place Where We Are Right
Mayor
Resurrection
From Summer or Its End
In the Full Severity of Mercy
Too Many
Poem for Arbor Day
Jacob and the Angel
Here
Elegy on an Abandoned Village
The Elegy on the Lost Child
From Now in the Storm, Poems 1963-1968
Jerusalem, 1967
The Bull Returns
A Luxury
To Bake the Bread of Yearning
National Thoughts
A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention
Elegy
Threading
Now in the Storm
Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela
PART TWO
edited and translated by Chana Bloch
From Not for the Sake of Remembering (1971)
Jews in the Land of Israel
Wildpeace
The Way It Was
Instead of Words
Gifts of Love
Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires
Psalm
From Behind All This a Great Happiness Is Hiding (1976)
Seven Laments for the War-Dead
Like the Inner Wall of a House
Love Song
I’ve Grown Very Hairy
A Dog After Love
A Bride Without a Dowry
The Sweet Breakdowns of Abigail
To a Convert
My Father in a White Space Suit
A Letter of Recommendation
On the Day I Left
A Letter
In a Leap Year
A Quiet Joy
A Mutual Lullaby
From Songs of Zion the Beautiful
From Time (1978)
Songs of Continuity
At the Monastery of Latroun
When I Was Young, the Whole Country Was Young
I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once
To My Love, Combing Her Hair
The Diameter of the Bomb
When I Banged My Head on the Door
You Carry the Weight of Heavy Buttocks
Advice for Good Love
You Are So Small and Slight in the Rain
A Man Like That on a Bald Mountain in Jerusalem
When a Man’s Far Away from His Country
The Eve
of Rosh Hashanah
I’ve Already Been Weaned
In the Garden, at the White Table
From the Book of Esther I Filtered the Sediment
So I Went Down to the Ancient Harbor
Now the Lifeguards Have All Gone Home
Near the Wall of a House
From A Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers (1980)
You Can Rely on Him
You Mustn’t Show Weakness
Lost Objects
Forgetting Someone
“The Rustle of History’s Wings,” as They Used to Say Then
1978 Reunion of Palmach Veterans at Ma’ayan Harod
An Eternal Window
There Are Candles That Remember
On the Day My Daughter Was Born No One Died
All These Make a Dance Rhythm
In the Morning It Was Still Night
A Child Is Something Else Again
When I Have a Stomachache
I Feel Just Fine in My Pants
Jerusalem Is Full of Used Jews
Ecology of Jerusalem
In the Old City
Tourists
An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion
A Song of Lies on Sabbath Eve
The Parents Left the Child
Love Is Finished Again
End of Summer in the Judean Mountains
Relativity
Poem Without an End
A Great Tranquillity: Questions and Answers
From The Hour of Grace (1983)
1924
Half-Sized Violin
A Pace Like That
The Box
The Last Word Is the Captain
Statistics
The Hour of Grace
What a Complicated Mess
I Lost My Identity Card
On Mount Muhraka
Summer Begins
Hamadiya
At the Seashore
On Some Other Planet You May Be Right
Autumn Rain in Tel Aviv
A Flock of Sheep Near the Airport
Almost a Love Poem
They Are All Dice
A Precise Woman
Jasmine
Kibbutz Gevaram
History
The Real Hero
At the Maritime Museum
Try to Remember Some Details
A Man in His Life
From From Man Thou Art and Unto Man Shalt Thou Return (1985)
My Mother Comes from the Days
Now She’s Breathing
My Mother Died on Shavuot
The Body Is the Cause of Love
Orchard
Late Marriage
Inside the Apple
North of Beersheba
I Guard the Children
North of San Francisco
Fall in Connecticut
Sandals
Jerusalem, 1985
Evidence
The Course of a Life
From The Fist, Too, Was Once the Palm of an Open Hand, and Fingers (1989)
What Kind of Man
The Greatest Desire
Two Disappeared into a House
I Know a Man
Between
Summer Evening in the Jerusalem Mountains
At the Beach
The Sea and the Shore
Autumn Is Near and the Memory of My Parents
Yom Kippur
Beginning of Autumn in the Hills of Ephraim
Ruhama
Huleikat—The Third Poem about Dicky
The Shore of Ashkelon
Fields of Sunflowers
First Rain on a Burned Car
We Did What We Had To
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles
Foreword to the 2013 Edition
Good, better, best; great, greater, greatest: the ranking of poets is a notoriously dubious activity, because no matter how laudatory or derogatory a judgment might be, it can be accused of ultimately being subjective. Yet there are certain poets who rise out of all this into a category of their own, whose work generates a new aesthetic identity and a new imaginative voice for their nation, and who incorporate in their poems so many of that country’s passions, tragedies, terrors, triumphs, and affections that its culture becomes more substantial, more real to their readers.
Yehuda Amichai is one of this select, singular group.
I should admit that it seems odd to be saying this about a man with whom I dined, drank coffee, and heard read his poems aloud. Something in me keeps asking for more distance, more room for the awe that surely should be felt for such a poet. Shouldn’t there be a discrepancy between the mind that brought forth the sublime work, and the ordinary, or nearly ordinary human being the poet himself of necessity was?
I’m hardly alone in feeling this. My wife and I happened to be in Jerusalem on the occasion of Amichai’s seventieth birthday, which turned out to be something like a national celebration. We sat in an auditorium marveling as banks of television cameras—those primitive probes that pretend to enhance our reality with cathode alchemizations of it—scanned the face of the poet, then scanned it again, until it seemed Amichai would be turned before our eyes from a person to a monument. . . . Or not a monument, a repository rather, as though all the phalanxes of poems Amichai had brought forth might be made visible in his person if the cameras and the audience and the nation attending could only gaze with sufficient vigilance at his by then somewhat abashed countenance.
Amichai, of course, wasn’t a monument; above all he was a poet, and we have to start there. He began writing young, was soon accomplished, but he was an experimental poet his whole career, bringing influences from American, English, and German poetry into his work, and into the wider spectrum of Israeli poetry, which had been mostly grounded until then in the early modernist Russians. His early work had a formal elegance and simplicity, influenced by the great (and nearly untranslatable) Rachel—usually called in Israel “Rachel the Poet”—and by the medieval Hebrew, Shmuel HaNagid. The work of the first was intimate, wistful, and tragic, the other’s robust, wide-ranging, dexterous. Amichai’s poems from the start incorporated both tendencies.
Then, in the nineteen fifties, inspired, he remarked on several occasions, by Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Rilke, and later Lowell and Berryman, he, along with a few others, notably Nathan Zach and Dahlia Ravikovitch, devised a new voice for their work, and for Hebrew poetry itself. It was a voice that incorporated the natural speech rhythms of vernacular Hebrew while never sacrificing the textures and grand resonance of the language of the Bible, a language which in a sense they were lowering, discovering new tonalities for, and ironizing—Amichai in particular, perhaps taking his cue from Auden, remained an ironist all his life.
Thematically, too, Amichai was always questing, testing, scouring history and myth for sources to widen his perspective. Perhaps every word any of us write or say or think is consciously or unconsciously conditioned by a particular relationship to time, yet some poets, like Amichai, demand a kind of satisfaction from time, past, present, and future, and they cast their utterances into eternity’s void not merely to refer to the unsayables of history, but to embody it, bring it in all its complexity into their work. In Amichai’s poems, time becomes a substance as malleable, as elastic as consciousness itself; the texture of his recall, both personal and communal, is detailed, meticulous, comprehensive.
Yet, if Amichai’s memory was prodigious, it was not in itself sufficient to his purposes. Although on the surface his work is forthright, often apparently plain, his decision to create, or accept, a poetic self that would fuse his country’s historical identity with his own life was a wager, daring, valiant, mostly unheard of in even the most socially conscious poets. The poetic personality he devised was expansive, courageous, and, not surprisingly, charged with contradiction.
Amichai’s poems are obsessed with history, the history of his country, his world, his se
lf in relation to world. But what is most crucial is how he writes poignantly, sensually, and in intricate detail about the substance of the present moment of the person in the poems, his thoughts, ideas, grand passions, fleeting emotions, resignations, and irritations. And that already vivid present is constantly informed by the past, by the present moments of that past, its vanished or vanishing personages. The poems evoke the lives and deaths of friends—friends living and friends dead and lost. There are enemies in the poems too, enemies in war, enemies in love; and strangers, glimpsed, acknowledged, actual, insisting that personal experience not be measured by war, terror, political upheaval, and despair, those large events that often confiscate our modes of expression. In Amichai’s work it is the intimate aspects of existence that come first, and which determine the quality of our response.
Amichai had a traditional religious upbringing, and he remained all his life a man in constant if sometimes unspoken dialogue with the divine; his presentation of his god is personal, and sympathetic but challenging. He questioned god, and questioned him again, sometimes beseechingly, sometimes with exasperation and impatience. As Chana Boch’s foreword to this volume points out, there is a constant reference in the poems to the religious past, to the historical-religious as it is evoked in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Jewish liturgical tradition. Yet what Amichai does with these sources is often subversive: the sacred is made profane, and vice versa; there is an irreverence in the poems, a playfulness, a sometimes absurd juxtaposition of the biblical and the modern.
At the same time, the physical body of the poet, his senses and his sensual memory, are essential to the poems’ weavings. That body is concrete, and it is sensitive: it aches, suffers, exalts, eats, makes love, or doesn’t. Amichai was an unabashedly erotic poet—has there ever in fact been any poet who wrote more voluptuously and delightedly about sex? Not merely sex as a device of allegory, as a path to spiritual knowledge or wisdom, not sex as noble abstraction, but sex as sex, as an inevitable component of love, as adoration of the body, both the loved one’s and one’s own—sex as the unique rapture of union common to us all.
In Israel, Amichai’s work is cherished for being accessible to a wide audience, for being “popular” in the best sense, which surely has its origins in his insistence on the particular, the individual, the seemingly trivial detail that in fact is anything but. Yet his work also continues to receive serious critical attention, no doubt because its complexities are so subtle, so well incorporated into the surface of the poems. These more technical matters are also well represented by Bloch and Mitchell’s selection: the deftness of the plotting, the verse music, the cunning syntactical patterns, and, most notable for me, the figuration—metaphors, similes, and the rest. Amichai was one of those wildly talented poets in whose work metaphors constantly erupt, flash, signal, shine: everything else, emotion, thought, experience, is intensified, transfigured, and exalted by that enviable, finally inexplicable gift.
