Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was not only Israel’s most beloved contemporary poet and the most widely translated, but also the most profoundly persuaded, with some justice, that his own convulsions and commotions were allied with the country’s at large. One of the poems included in this sumptuous collection, the largest to appear in English, begins with the line When I was young, the country was young. Another likens the poet’s emotional topography to the rugged landscape. Love and hate, he writes, have made my face resemble the face of this ruined land.
Amichai was not born to this land. In the 1930s, at the age of 11, he and his family fled to Palestine from Würzburg in Nazi Germany. During World War II he served with the Palestinian brigade of the British Army, and later fought in Israel’s war of independence, in the Sinai campaign, and the Yom Kippur war. Reading through this new anthology—judiciously selected from Amichai’s 12 books of verse—it comes as no surprise to discover that his strong identification with the biography and geography of Israel runs so deep.
But why, in turn, do his fellow Israelis recognize themselves in his poems and welcome their author as somehow “representative”? To begin with, Amichai gave voice to the hybrid quality of Hebrew. On the one hand, placing himself squarely in the Hebraic tradition, he drew from the rich allusiveness of an ancient language, every word of which, he said, “reverberates through the halls of Jewish history.” The language of religion is “a geological layer that exists within me,” he wrote, “although it’s extremely compact, because it’s so very early.” Having been raised in an Orthodox home, the language of the prayers and the Bible naturally tied him to a larger patrimony. “Anyone who writes in Hebrew,” he commented to Paul Celan (who visited Amichai in Jerusalem in 1969), “binds his own existence with that of the language and the people.”
On the other hand, Amichai was alert to the ruptures of a language, as he put it, “torn from its sleep in the Bible,” which had to awaken to the clamor of the everyday. With his first collection of poems, Now and in Other Days (1955), he grafted onto Israeli writing an utterly new plainness of speech. In contrast to the mannered, aloof decorum of his precursors, Amichai’s more readable poems juxtapose the biblical, medieval, and liturgical registers against the colloquial and conversational Israeli vernacular, with all its irreverence and irony, its gravity and levity.
But the wideness of Amichai’s appeal goes beyond his virtuosity in an old-new language. The best of the poems assembled here arrestingly juxtapose sacred with secular and are charged with the current between those two poles. A door of a house stands open like a tomb / where someone was resurrected. Jerusalem’s air is saturated with prayers, like some sort of industrial pollution. And Jerusalem, Amichai’s city and his great subject, is like a merry-go-round:
In another poem, Jerusalem’s domes are like blisters before bursting, its minarets like three-stage missiles, its bells like hand grenades. Prayers intended for on high fall back to earth like shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells / that have missed their target. Here the profane illuminates the sacred, rather than the other way round.
Belief and blasphemy rally with each other in the percussions of Amichai’s lines like the sound of a ping-pong game. In one poem he affirms that I still show kindness to the god of my childhood, but he professes himself weaned from his father’s God. His poems display a keen feeling for tradition, but none for redemption. In a rare reference to the Shoah, he compares the tattoos on the forearms of survivors to telephone numbers of God, / numbers that do not answer.
Other poems likewise resist divine consolations:
It is here that eros enters in. Love substitutes for loss of God, as when the poet tells his lover:
Throughout, Amichai plagiarizes the language of tradition to subvert tradition. He rewrites biblical stories and parodies prayers. He turns the classical Hebrew prayer We must praise the Lord of all toward a woman: But we must praise the loins of all: your lap. He compares a night of lovemaking to the wresting match between Jacob and the angel. An embroidered skullcap reminds him of the pattern of his lover’s underwear. He compares Torah scroll covers to silken petticoats / and gowns of embroidered velvet / held up by narrow shoulder straps.
Beyond the sacred and the secular, this collection shows us how, as Amichai’s poetry matured, it began to work like a pestle, churning together opposite elements for the sake of a little flavor, / a little fragrance. The poems here increasingly oscillate between, and fuse together, desire and sadness, departure and return, remembering and forgetting, severity and compassion—above all, pain and joy. Amichai’s poems repeatedly allude to the precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. In later years—as in his suite of 22 poems, Open Closed Open (2000)—they close in on the attempt to describe joy with pain’s precision.
That attempt is deeply personal. “You are the poem you write,” Celan told Amichai. Yet Amichai saw himself not as “representative” so much as a go-between, a channel of transmission. In one poem included here, the sight of an ancient aqueduct heightens his awareness that he and it do the same thing: conduct and convey that which / is not ours / from one place to another.
Amichai did not himself subscribe to Robert Frost’s notion that poetry is what gets lost in translation. This collection shows how ably his translators have conducted the flow of his words from one language into another. The English versions here convey the inventiveness—and also the self-deprecation and droll humor—of the originals.
If translation involves the trick of carrying a poem into the afterlife without causing death, this invaluable volume has given us an Amichai, alive and vivid, who distilled his country’s aspirations and contradictions into essential words. In his afterlife, Amichai continues to chart not just the disjunctions in Israel’s language, but also the fissures in its uneasy sense of itself as a place caught between the mundane and the sublime.
Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is the author of Running Commentary and the translator from the Hebrew of Hagit Grossman’s forthcoming book of poetry, Trembling in the City.
