Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948-1994
Translated by Benjamin & Barbara Harshav
HarperCollins
478 pp. $30.00
Review by Jennifer Clarvoe
Featured in BBR March 1995
"If God was not full of mercy," one of Yehuda Amichai's early poems asserts, "mercy would have been in the world/Not just in him." Amichai's poetry is not happy, but it is almost always grandly comic, or comic on a grand scale. It is wonderful to have this hefty collection from Israel's most prominent poet, spanning almost 50 years of richly varied writing, to allow us to see the broad scope of Amichai's humane comedy. These poems move across exceedingly bleak terrain with comic awe, comic tenderness and comic fury. God is a frequent target-a god who is made to take many forms. We see him, for example, with his "hand in the world/Like my mother's hands in the innards/Of a slaughtered chicken," or we find him "on his back under the world," where "something's always breaking down, needs repair."
Amichai's comedy does not distract from human suffering. Instead it provides the perspective from which to approach, acknowledge and see through it. For example: "through the wound in my chest/God peeps at the world./I am the door/In his abode." It is not unusual for Amichai to speak from different doorways, to shift perspective with dizzying, dazzling fluidity away from some limited or limiting "I" and to open out, suddenly, on an unexpected vista. He swings like a hinge between past and present, men and women, war and peace, technology and mythology. "I see you open the refrigerator, my girl," another poem concludes, "Illuminated in the light of another world." And in the title poem of his 1980 collection, Great Calm: Questions and Answers, he reveals yet another door:
People in the hall lighted so it hurts
Spoke about religion
In the life of contemporary people
And about the places of God.
People spoke in excited voices
As at airports.
I left them:
I opened an iron door with the sign
"Emergency" and entered
A great calm: questions and answers.
The light-from the refrigerator, from the wound in the chest, from the iron door of Emergency-shines with amazing simplicity and directness. Amichai's poetry makes a place for that odd proximity of emergency and calm-a calm that clarifies without resolving our questions and answers.
Those questions can reach a comically frantic pitch, as they do in #22 (from Time, 1978) in which a questioner hopes he hears-with all the inexhaustible cheap genius of a desperate imagination-an airplane, a nightingale, "the raucous screwing of a he-bulldozer and she-bulldozer," a peacock, and a hymn. This complex sound is uncannily described as "the consolation of mourners humming like a teapot/On a low flame. And now an explosion!" And so we hear that bomb, which the poem warily acknowledges as "my friend the quiet artillery man whistling/And feeding home cannons with shells at dawn."
In one of his most stunning and stunningly plain war poems, #20 from Time (1978), Amichai sends another bomb home:
The radius of the bomb was twelve inches
And the radius of its effective force seven yards
Containing four dead and eleven wounded.
And around those, in a wider circle
Of pain and time, are scattered two hospitals
And one graveyard. But the young woman,
Buried in the place she came from,
Over a hundred kilometers from here,
Widens the circle quite a bit,
And the lonely man mourning her death
In the provinces of a Mediterranean land,
Includes the whole world in the circle.
And I shall omit the scream of orphans
That reaches God's throne
And way beyond, and widens the circle
To no end and no God.
Not happy poems, but tonic and clarifying. Amichai explodes the empty heavens in order to explore "real heavens."
In "Now She Descends"(1989), a wonderful poem about the death of his mother (whom he describes in an early poem "like an old windmill/Two hands always raised to scream to the sky,/And two descending to make sandwiches"), Amichai describes a process of descent and true connection that attempts to redeem us from the terrible inclusions of the bomb:
Now she descends into the earth,
Now she is on a level with the telephone cables, electrical wires,
Pure water pipes and impure water pipes,
Now she descends to deeper places,
Deeper than deep, there lie
The reasons for all this flowing,
Now she is in the layers of stone and ground water,
There lie the motives of wars and the movers of history
And the future destinies of nations and peoples
Yet unborn:
My mother, Satellite of Redemption,
Turns the earth
Into real heavens.
This is a generous, useful, necessary volume whose range can only be hinted at here. Other translations of Amichai's poems (by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, for example, in the Selected Poems, or by Ted Hughes and others in Love Poems) frequently offer more fluid and graceful poems in their own right than these, which sometimes suggest the roughness of straight-forwardly faithful translation. And no one has yet, to my ear, offered convincingly unstrained versions of Amichai's rhyming, metrical poems. It should be clear, however, that the brilliant conceptions, striking images, fantastic and fantastically simple combinations of these poems survive and thrive in translation. They should make us terrifyingly and exhilaratingly legible to each other and to ourselves.
Jennifer Clarvoe is on leave from Kenyon College and teaching at Boston University and Wellesley College.
©1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.
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