by Chana Bloch
When speaking of Amichai, Israelis invariably refer to the richness of his language, the chromatics he evokes in the music of his verse, the way the ancient and the modern effortlessly come together in his work. Hebrew, that ever old, ever young language, has changed over the course of Israeli history. Yet one of the reasons Amichai is so celebrated in Israel is because his poems have not dated, they maintain their unique power despite many of them having been composed generations ago.
One longs to be able to hear all those over- and undertones in the poems in English. We never can, but despite Amichai’s persistent rooting of his work in his own language, culture, and history, reading him in translation is never, as reading translations can be, like eavesdropping on a conversation in which we can’t really participate. His poems when translated as sympathetically and inspiringly as they are in this volume come into English with force and grandeur.
C. K. Williams
Vaux-sur-Eure, France, 2012
Foreword 1996
A friend of mine tells a story about some Israeli students who were called up in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As soon as they were notified, they went back to their rooms at the University, and each packed his gear, a rifle, and a book of Yehuda Amichai’s poems. It is a little hard to envision this scene: these days we don’t think of soldiers as resorting to poetry under fire, and Amichai’s poetry is not standard government issue. It isn’t patriotic in the ordinary sense of the word, it doesn’t cry death to the enemy, and it offers no simple consolation for killing and dying.
Still, I know what these young soldiers were after, because I have often found myself turning to Amichai’s poetry as a kind of restorative. Pungent, ironic, tender, playful and despairing by turns, it draws me by the energy of its language, the exuberant inventiveness and startling leaps that freshen the world, making it seem a place where anything is possible. And by the humor, too—a briny Jewish humor that can set the teeth on edge. And I am attracted by a certain astringent quality of mind, a skeptical intelligence that is impatient with camouflage and pathos and self-deceit, that insists on questioning even what it loves.
Love is at the center of Amichai’s world, but he is quick to grant that his mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun, that sex is at once an enticing scent and a sticky business. And Jerusalem, the beloved city, he contemplates with a mixture of love and exasperation. No one has written more intimately about this landscape—the dust and stones and the ghosts of barbed-wire fences; the Old City with its Wailing Wall and mosques and churches, its Solomon and Herod and Suleiman the Magnificent, all under a cloud of prophecy; the foreign consulates and the housing projects; the Jews and the Arabs; the zealous black-coated Hasidim and the tourists; the brooding presence of the dead.
Amichai’s way of seeing this place—and most things he writes about—from both the inside and outside, balancing tenderness against irony, reflects his experience of two very different worlds. Born in Würzberg, Germany, in 1924, he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home with its strict religious observance and its protective God, as inescapable as family. His father was a shopkeeper, his grandfather a farmer, and his memories of childhood (the political situation notwithstanding) idyllic. In 1936 he came to Palestine with his parents, and his adult life has been lived in the midst of the convulsive struggle of Israel to become a state, and then to survive and define itself. Amichai made his living as a teacher while studying war—as a soldier with the British army in World War II, with the Palmach in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and with the Israeli army in 1956 and 1973. He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war.
Throughout his career, he has written about memory and the burdens of memory; about the lingering sweetness and simplicity of his parents’ lives set against the perplexities of his own; about war as loss and love as a hedge against loss. The most troubling loss is that of his childhood, left behind in the normal course of life and then destroyed by war. “My childhood of blessèd memory,” he calls it, borrowing an expression commonly used when speaking of the dead.
Amichai holds on tightly to whatever he has lost. “What I will never see again I must love forever” is his first article of faith. That is why there are so many elegies of love here. And that is why the God in these poems, who at times seems no more than a figure of speech, deeply embedded in the language, makes his presence strongly felt even in his absence. Amichai’s quarrel with God is what stamps this poetry as so unmistakably Jewish. That quarrel carries on the venerable tradition of Abraham, Jeremiah, and Job—though the object of his irony is the Bible as well, not least the visionary fervor of the prophets. As he writes in “When I Banged My Head on the Door,” a poem that may be taken as his ars poetica:
When I banged my head on the door, I screamed,
“My head, my head,” and I screamed, “Door, door,”
and I didn’t scream “Mama” and I didn’t scream “God.”
And I didn’t prophesy a world at the End of Days
where there will be no more heads and doors.
What Amichai loves best is the ordinary human being with his pain and his joy, a museum in his heart and shopping baskets at his side. In “Tourists” it’s not the Roman arch he wants us to care about but the man sitting nearby with the fruit and vegetables he has just bought for his family.
Amichai began to write in 1948; his first collection of poetry appeared in 1955. Since then he has published eleven volumes of poetry, many of them best sellers, as well as novels, short stories, and plays. His poems enjoy an enormous popularity in Israel. They are recited at weddings and funerals, taught in the schools, and set to music. And for a poet so rooted in his own place, his work is remarkably well known outside of Israel, having been translated into some thirty-three languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Albanian.
The poems in this volume, chosen from Amichai’s best work over a productive career of nearly half a century, should give some notion of his stylistic range: long poems and short, rhymed and unrhymed, in formal meters and in free verse; poem cycles; prose poems and poems hovering at the borders of prose; poems of an overflowing abundance and poems of a tightly coiled concision. All the translations are our own: Stephen Mitchell translated the poems written before 1969, and I translated the later ones. Many of these have not previously appeared in English.
The poems lend themselves to translation because they speak clearly and directly, and because Amichai’s striking metaphors carry the burden of his meaning. But his language is far more dense and inventive than this may suggest. Reading these poems in Hebrew, one encounters allusions to biblical and liturgical texts on every page. The Israeli reader, even one who has not had Amichai’s formal religious education, will have studied the Bible from grade school through college, and is also likely to recognize the kind of liturgical texts that Amichai refers to, such as the Mourner’s Kaddish or the Yom Kippur service. Because this is obviously not true of most readers of English, we have often borrowed from or imitated the King James Bible as a way of pointing up allusions that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. On the other hand, modern Hebrew, revived as a spoken language only a hundred years ago, is much closer to the Hebrew of the Old Testament than our own language is to seventeenth-century English, and Amichai’s allusions never have a “literary” air. So when we felt that the archaisms of the King James version intruded awkwardly on the naturalness and ease of Amichai’s diction, we found other equivalents. And when an allusion would have required too much explanation, we sometimes chose to disregard it.
To write poetry in Hebrew is to be confronted with the meaning of Jewish experience, from biblical times to the present day, in all its strangeness and complexity. Amichai’s provocative allusions—ranging from the witty and mischievous (“The man under his fig tree telephoned the man under his vine”) to the subversive and iconoclastic (“The army jet makes peace in the heavens”)—are one way of wrestling with the angel of history. The necessity of confro
nting the past is imposed by the language itself; it is Amichai’s achievement to have found in that wrestling his distinctive identity as a poet:
to speak now in this weary language,
a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,
it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.
To use the words “bomb” and “God” in the same breath in Hebrew is to change the landscape of the language.
Amichai never lets us forget the human cost of war: the bereaved father who “has grown very thin, has lost / the weight of his son,” the ever-widening circle of mourners after a bomb attack, including the orphans whose outcry
. . . reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
And he has consistently questioned the heroic ideal of Israel’s early years, setting in its place the dream of an ordinary life.
Since he is Israel’s most beloved poet, and since Israeli society is unusually receptive to poetry, one may say that he has in some measure helped to prepare the way for peace. This was publicly acknowledged when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasir Arafat in 1994. Invited to participate in the awards ceremony in Oslo, Amichai read “Wildpeace,” written over twenty years earlier, when the notion of peace seemed dismally remote. In this poem he brushes aside the grand rhetoric of the prophets—the vision of the wolf and the lamb, or what he sardonically calls “the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares”—and speaks of peace as a simple necessity:
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
In his acceptance speech, Rabin read one of Amichai’s best-known poems, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” which begins:
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.
Amichai’s lines seem chillingly apt in the light of Rabin’s assassination at a peace rally less than a year later.
Just as the young soldiers carried Amichai’s words with them into battle, the old soldier Rabin brought them into the dangerous arena of peacemaking, and for the same reason. There they go on civilizing our hearts, reminding us—for we need to be reminded—
that the fist, too,
was once the palm of an open hand, and fingers.
CHANA BLOCH
For Hana
God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children
God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children.
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.
But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.
Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of compassion
that Mother handed down to us,
so that their happiness will protect us
now and in other days.
The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner’s House in Jerusalem
The mediators, the peacemakers, the compromise-shapers, the comforters
live in the white house
and get their nourishment from far away,
through winding pipes, through dark veins, like a fetus.
And their secretaries are lipsticked and laughing,
and their sturdy chauffeurs wait below, like horses in a stable,
and the trees that shade them have their roots in no-man’s-land
and the illusions are children who went out to find cyclamen in the field
and do not come back.
And the thoughts pass overhead, restless, like reconnaissance planes,
and take photos and return and develop them
in dark sad rooms.
And I know they have very heavy chandeliers
and the boy-I-was sits on them and swings
out and back, out and back, out till there’s no coming back.
And later on, night will arrive to draw
rusty and bent conclusions from our old lives,
and over all the houses a melody will gather the scattered words
like a hand gathering crumbs upon a table
after the meal, while the talk continues
and the children are already asleep.
And hopes come to me like bold seafarers,
like the discoverers of continents coming to an island,
and stay for a day or two
and rest . . .
And then they set sail.
Autobiography, 1952
My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard
and I left it once, before I was finished,
and he remained there with his big, empty worry.
And my mother was like a tree on the shore
between her arms that stretched out toward me.
And in ’31 my hands were joyous and small
and in ’41 they learned to use a gun
and when I first fell in love
my thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
and the girl’s white hand held them all
by a thin string—then let them fly away.
And in ’51 the motion of my life
was like the motion of many slaves chained to a ship,
and my father’s face like the headlight on the front of a train
growing smaller and smaller in the distance,
and my mother closed all the many clouds inside her brown closet,
and as I walked up my street
the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,
blood that wanted to get out in many wars
and through many openings,
that’s why it knocks against my head from the inside
and reaches my heart in angry waves.
But now, in the spring of ’52, I see
that more birds have returned than left last winter.
And I walk back down the hill to my house.
And in my room: the woman, whose body is heavy
and filled with time.
The Smell of Gasoline Ascends in My Nose
The smell of gasoline ascends in my nose.
Love, I’ll protect you and hold you close
like an etrog in soft wool, so carefully—
my dead father used to do it that way.
Look, the olive-tree no longer grieves—
it knows there are seasons and a man must leave,
stand by my side and dry your face now
and smile as if in a family photo.
I’ve packed my wrinkled shirts and my trouble.
I will never forget you, girl of my final
window in front of the deserts that are
empty of windows, filled with war.
You used to laugh but now you keep quiet,
the beloved country never cries out,
the wind will rustle in the dry leaves soon—
when will I sleep beside you again?
In the earth there are raw materials that, unlike us,
have not been taken out of the darkness,
the army jet makes peace in the heavens
upon us and upon all lovers in autumn.
Six Poems for Tamar
1
The rain is speaking quietly,
you can sl
eep now.
Near my bed, the rustle of newspaper wings.
There are no other angels.
I’ll wake up early and bribe the coming day
to be kind to us.
2
You had a laughter of grapes:
many round green laughs.
Your body is full of lizards.
All of them love the sun.
Flowers grew in the field, grass grew on my cheeks,
everything was possible.
3
You’re always lying on
my eyes.
Every day of our life together
Ecclesiastes cancels a line of his book.
We are the saving evidence in the terrible trial.
We’ll acquit them all!
4
Like the taste of blood in the mouth,
spring was upon us—suddenly.
The world is awake tonight.
It is lying on its back, with its eyes open.
The crescent moon fits the line of your cheek,
your breast fits the line of my cheek.
5
Your heart plays blood-catch
inside your veins.
Your eyes are still warm, like beds
time has slept in.
Your thighs are two sweet yesterdays,
I’m coming to you.
All hundred and fifty psalms
roar halleluyah.
6
My eyes want to flow into each other
like two neighboring lakes.
To tell each other
everything they’ve seen.
My blood has many relatives.
They never visit.
But when they die,
my blood will inherit.
