1924
I was
born in 1924. If I were a violin my age
I wouldn’t be very good. As a wine I would be splendid
Or altogether sour. As a dog I would be dead. As a book
I would begin to be expensive or thrown out by now.
As a forest I would be young, as a machine ridiculous,
And as a human being I’m very tired.
I was
born in 1924. When I think about humanity
I think just about those born in my year.
Their mothers gave birth with my mother,
Wherever they were, in hospitals or in dark flats.
On this
day, my birthday, I would like
To say a great prayer for you,
Whose load of hopes and disappointments
Pulls your life downward,
Whose deeds diminish
And whose gods increase,
You are all brothers of my hope and companions of my despair.
May you
find the right rest,
The living in their life, the dead in their death.
He who
remembers his childhood better
Than others is the winner,
If there are any winners at all.
I wouldn’t be very good. As a wine I would be splendid
Or altogether sour. As a dog I would be dead. As a book
I would begin to be expensive or thrown out by now.
As a forest I would be young, as a machine ridiculous,
And as a human being I’m very tired.
I think just about those born in my year.
Their mothers gave birth with my mother,
Wherever they were, in hospitals or in dark flats.
To say a great prayer for you,
Whose load of hopes and disappointments
Pulls your life downward,
Whose deeds diminish
And whose gods increase,
You are all brothers of my hope and companions of my despair.
The living in their life, the dead in their death.
Than others is the winner,
If there are any winners at all.
Once I left it before I was finished
And he remained with his great, empty worry.
And my mother—like a tree on the shore
Between her arms outstretched for me.
And in '41 they learned to use a rifle
And when I loved my first love
My thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
And the girl's white hand clutched them all
With a thin string—and then let them fly.
Was like the movement of many slaves rowing a ship,
And the face of my father like the lantern at the end of a parting
train,
And my mother closed all the clouds in her brown closet.
And I climbed up my street,
And the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,
Blood that wanted to go out to many wars,
Through many openings.
It pounds on my head from inside
And moves in angry waves to my heart.
More birds have returned than left last winter.
And I return down the slope of the mountain
To my room where the woman's body is heavy
And full of time.
Like Our
Bodies' Imprint
Like
our bodies' imprint
Not a sign will remain that we were in this place.
The world closes behind us,
The sand straightens itself.
Dates
are already in view
In which you no longer exist,
Already a wind blows clouds
Which will not rain on us both.
And your
name is already in the passenger lists of ships,
And in the registers of hotels,
Whose names alone
Deaden the heart.
The
three languages I know,
All the colors in which I see and dream:
None
will help me.
Not a sign will remain that we were in this place.
The world closes behind us,
The sand straightens itself.
In which you no longer exist,
Already a wind blows clouds
Which will not rain on us both.
And in the registers of hotels,
Whose names alone
Deaden the heart.
All the colors in which I see and dream:
While the smells of food and prayer rose from every house
And the sound of the Sabbath angels’ wings was in the air,
While still a child I started to lie to my father:
“I went to another synagogue.”
But the taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue
And in all the houses that night
Hymns rose up along with lies
To celebrate the Sabbath.
And in all the houses that night
Sabbath angels died like flies in a lamp,
And lovers put mouth to mouth,
Blew each other up until they floated upward,
Or burst.
And since then I always go to another synagogue.
And my father returned the lie when he died:
“I’ve gone to another life.”
And did not hate or love his enemies.
Already he was forming me, I know,
Daily, out of his tranquilities;
Between the bombs and smoke, for his son’s sake,
And put into his ragged knapsack with
The leftovers of my mother’s hardening cake.
The many dead for my sake unforsaken,
So that I should not die like them in dread,
But love them, seeing them as once he saw.
He filled his eyes with them; he was mistaken,
Like them, I must go out to meet my war.
I find out about things that have been lost.
This way i know what people had
And what they love.
On my hairy chest and there I found my father’s smell
Again, after many years.
Who can’t go back to Czechoslovakia
Or who is afraid to return to Chile.
The white vaulted room
With the telegram
On the table.
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body
for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say "Thank you" when the Lord has given,
to say "You're welcome" when the Lord has taken away.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.
glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.
in Jerusalem. My bed
stands on the brink of a deep valley
without rolling down into it.
Commandments on my lips
like an old tune someone hums to himself.
That’s not a scar you feel under my shirt, that’s
a letter of recommendation, folded up tight,
from my father:
“All the same, he’s a good boy, and full of love.”
He would do it by gently stroking my forehead, not
by tearing away the blanket.
And as his reward, may he be wakened
gently and with love
on the Day of the Resurrection.
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum
houses,
And who was he, the last of the last to speak,
And who forgot his coat between these houses,
And who was the one who stayed. Why didn't he flee?
A long-standing error, a misunderstanding of yore,
The edge of the Land, where an era begins to be
For somebody else. A bit of stillness there.
The reeds of the end, their spells of sway and sough.
The wind passed on its way through that locale
And a serious dog saw the humans laugh.
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
Try to remember some details. For they have no face
and their soul is hidden and their crying
is the same as their laughter,
and their silence and their shouting rise to one height
and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees
and they have no life outside this narrow space
and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory
and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing
and paper cups that are used once only.
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details.
People use each other
as a healing for their pain.
They put each other
on their existential wounds,
on eye, on cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other hard and won’t let go.
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
the wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)
a Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs,
abandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer
nor the voice of lamentation is heard there
for the dead praise not the Lord.
Only the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves
and cheering
each time they find one--like mushrooms in the forest, like
wild strawberries.
Here's another grave! There's the name of my mother's
mothers, and a name from the last century. And here's a name,
and there! And as I was about to brush the moss from the name--
Look! an open hand engraved on the tombstone, the grave
of a kohen,
his fingers splayed in a spasm of holiness and blessing,
and here's a grave concealed by a thicket of berries
that has to be brushed aside like a shock of hair
from the face of a beautiful beloved woman.
Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
But I do know that you don't.
Not only between Jews and Arabs,
But Between me and you,
When we were there together.
We built ourselves a house of deadening wars
Like men of far north
Who build themselves a safe warm house of deadening ice.
But we haven't been there together.
By now I know
That History doesn't repeat itself,
As I always knew that you wouldn't
I'm afraid they'll start hunting me because of my fur.
it looks like an air photo of a railway station.
like eyes under the blindfold of someone to be shot.
hungry for life I'll die.
and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
Of the rising summer dust.
The rain doesn't remember the rain of yesteryear.
A year is a trained beast with no memories.
Soon you will again wear your harnesses,
Beautiful and embroidered, to hold
Sheer stockings: you
Mare and harnesser in one body.
In the panic of a sudden vision
Of ancient saints.
I let a dog smell at
My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose
And set out to find you.
Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis
Or at least
Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.
about a train that leaves from place A and another train
that leaves from place B. When will they meet?
No one ever asked what happens when they meet
Will they stop, or pass each other, or collide?
None of the problems was about a man who leaves
from place A
anda woman who leaves from place B. When will they
meet,
will they meet at all, and for how long?
And as for that math book: now I’ve reached
The final pages with the Table of Answers.
Back then it was forbidden to look.
Now it is permitted. Now I check
Where I was right and where I was wrong
And know what I did well and what I did not do. Amen.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
"Behind all this some great happiness is hiding."
and you've got to have a tan.
But sometimes I feel like the thin veils
of Jewish women who faint
at weddings and on Yom Kippur.
and you've got to make a list
of all the things you can load
in a baby carriage without a baby.
if I pull out the stopper
after pampering myself in the bath,
I'm afraid that all of Jerusalem, and with it the whole world,
will drain out into the huge darkness.
and at night I work in the Balaam Mills,
turning curse into blessing and blessing into curse.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I'm like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing of cry of a siren,
and people think it's ordinary speech.
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day
It hurts
Spoke of religion
In the lives of contemporary people
And on the place of God
Like in an airport
I left them
I opened an iron door that had written on it
“Emergency and I entered within.
Great serenity: Questions and answers
In little sweet cakes.
My love filled my window
With raisins of stars.
I enclose longings within me like air
Pockets in a loaf of bread.
Outside I am smooth and quiet and brown.
The world loves me.
But my hair is sad like the reeds in a drying marsh –
All birds of rare and beautiful plumage
Fly from me.
Grasses and masts stood beside the shore,
And I, lying there,
Couldn’t distinguish between them,
For they all rose up to the sky above me.
Only the words of my mother stayed with me
Like a slice of bread wrapped in rustling tissue
And I did not know when my father would return,
For there was another forest beyond the clearing.
A bull tossed the sun on its horns,
And in the nights the streetlights stroked
My cheeks with the walls,
And the moon, like a great jar, tilted itself
And watered my thirsty sleep.
or its ending.
That afternoon you were
dressed for the first time
in your shroud,
and never noticed,
because of the printed
flowers on its cloth.
A table weighed with silence like a parting.
The sea outside. And a shoe filled with nothing,
Looking for a foot that took its leave.
Almost books. And a glass without a use.
A bit of old air: two years, perhaps, since it
Refused to go out, and stayed here for always.
As women feel the cloth in a store;
Is he good, will he wash well in the laundry?
I hung it up, and looked outside to find
How it clatters, moving in the wind.
Yehuda
Amichai is recognized as one of Israel’s finest poets. His poems, written in
Hebrew, have been translated into 40 languages, and entire volumes of his work
have been published in English, French, German, Swedish, Spanish, and Catalan.
“Yehuda Amichai, it has been remarked with some justice,” according to
translator Robert Alter, “is the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King
David.” Amichai’s translations into English have been particularly popular, and
his imaginative and accessible style credited with introducing contemporary
Hebrew poetry to American and English readers. The poet C.K. Williams described
Amichai as “the shrewdest and most solid of poetic intelligences.” Amichai’s
numerous books of poetry include his first in Hebrew, Now and In Other Days
(1955), which announced his distinctively colloquial voice, and two
breakthrough volumes that introduced him to American readers: Poems (1969) and
Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (1971), both co-translated by Ted Hughes, who
became a good friend and advocate of Amichai’s work. Later works translated
into English include Time: Travels of a Latter-Day Benjamin of Tudela (1976),
Yehuda Amichai: A Life in Poetry 1948-1994 (1994), The Selected Poetry of
Yehuda Amichai (1996), Exile at Home (1998), and Open Closed Open (2000).
Amichai also published two novels, including his first work to be translated
into English, Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1968), and a book of short
stories.
Born in Germany in 1924, Amichai and his family fled the country during Hitler’s rise to power when Amichai was 12 and settled in Palestine. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war he fought with the Israeli defense forces. The rigors and horrors of his service in this conflict, and in World War II, inform his poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amichai noted that all poetry was political: “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making,” he said. “Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.” It was during World War II that Amichai began to be interested in poetry, reading modern English and American poetry, by authors such as Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot. According to Alter, Amichai’s early work bears a resemblance to the poetry of Thomas and Auden. “[Rainer Maria] Rilke,” wrote Alter, “is another informing presence for him, occasionally in matters of style—he has written vaguely Rilkesque elegies—but perhaps more as a model for using a language of here and now as an instrument to catch the glimmerings of a metaphysical beyond.” Although Amichai’s native language was German, he read Hebrew fluently by the time he immigrated to Palestine.
After
World War II, Amichai attended Hebrew University. He taught in secondary
schools, teachers’ seminars, Hebrew University, and later at American
institutions such as New York University, the University of
California-Berkeley, and Yale University. In a New York Times Magazine profile
of Amichai, Alter noted that by the mid-1960s Amichai was “already regarded in
many circles in Israel as the country’s leading poet.” Amichai’s reputation
outside of Israel soon soared. Amichai, Alter explained, was “accorded
international recognition unprecedented for a modern Hebrew poet.” In Israel,
his books were frequently bestsellers, and in 1982, Amichai received the
prestigious Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in
poetry’s language.” Among his many other honors and awards, he was nominated
for the Nobel Prize.
While he became known as an “accessible” poet whose work translated seamlessly into many languages, Alter has taken pains to describe Amichai’s style as something much more complex in its native Hebrew. Amichai frequently exploited Hebrew’s levels of diction, Alter noted in an article for Modern Hebrew Literature, which are generally based on historical usage of words, rather than class. Alter continues: “Amichai’s exploitation of indigenous stylistic resources is often connected with his sensitivity to the expressive sounds of the Hebrew words he uses and with his inventive puns, which are sometimes playful, sometimes dead serious, and often both at once. But what is most untranslatable are the extraordinary allusive twists he gives to densely specific Hebrew terms and texts.” Despite the echoes of other poets and traditions in his work, Alter stressed it was important to remember “that Amichai is not simply an Auden or a William Carlos Williams writing from right to left, that he uses his own language and literary tradition as a delicately tuned instrument that communicates to Hebrew readers certain tonalities that others will not hear.” Yet Amichai’s entire body of work speaks persuasively to his powers as an everyman, both of his people and the world. Reviewing The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, American poet Ed Hirsch stated that Amichai “is a representative man with unusual gifts who in telling his own story also relates the larger story of his people.”
Yehuda Amichai died in Jerusalem on September 22, 2000. His papers and archive is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Born in Germany in 1924, Amichai and his family fled the country during Hitler’s rise to power when Amichai was 12 and settled in Palestine. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war he fought with the Israeli defense forces. The rigors and horrors of his service in this conflict, and in World War II, inform his poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amichai noted that all poetry was political: “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making,” he said. “Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.” It was during World War II that Amichai began to be interested in poetry, reading modern English and American poetry, by authors such as Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot. According to Alter, Amichai’s early work bears a resemblance to the poetry of Thomas and Auden. “[Rainer Maria] Rilke,” wrote Alter, “is another informing presence for him, occasionally in matters of style—he has written vaguely Rilkesque elegies—but perhaps more as a model for using a language of here and now as an instrument to catch the glimmerings of a metaphysical beyond.” Although Amichai’s native language was German, he read Hebrew fluently by the time he immigrated to Palestine.
While he became known as an “accessible” poet whose work translated seamlessly into many languages, Alter has taken pains to describe Amichai’s style as something much more complex in its native Hebrew. Amichai frequently exploited Hebrew’s levels of diction, Alter noted in an article for Modern Hebrew Literature, which are generally based on historical usage of words, rather than class. Alter continues: “Amichai’s exploitation of indigenous stylistic resources is often connected with his sensitivity to the expressive sounds of the Hebrew words he uses and with his inventive puns, which are sometimes playful, sometimes dead serious, and often both at once. But what is most untranslatable are the extraordinary allusive twists he gives to densely specific Hebrew terms and texts.” Despite the echoes of other poets and traditions in his work, Alter stressed it was important to remember “that Amichai is not simply an Auden or a William Carlos Williams writing from right to left, that he uses his own language and literary tradition as a delicately tuned instrument that communicates to Hebrew readers certain tonalities that others will not hear.” Yet Amichai’s entire body of work speaks persuasively to his powers as an everyman, both of his people and the world. Reviewing The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, American poet Ed Hirsch stated that Amichai “is a representative man with unusual gifts who in telling his own story also relates the larger story of his people.”
Yehuda Amichai died in Jerusalem on September 22, 2000. His papers and archive is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Yehuda
Amichai. – Poetry Foundation
About his poems.
Like a
Prayer : The poetry of Yehuda Amichai. By
James Wood. The New Yorker,
December 27, 2015
December 27, 2015
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