Volume 24 149
that country, the exalted and the mundane. In his
world, wars become mixed up with love affairs;
Isaiah mingles ironically with modern technology
“the man under his fig tree telephoned the man un-
der his vine”; the dead of Wurzburg, Germany
(where Amichai was born in 1924) are seen again
in contemporary Jerusalem; and, in one particularly
startling move, the injunction of Genesis to “Be
fruitful and multiply” gets absurdly associated, by
way of sexual “sticky business,” with “shaving
cream.” Here we have a writer of impurity, amal-
gamation, admixture. In this way, he is the oppo-
site of the writer as alchemist, ceaselessly laboring
in an hermetic cell to transmute base metals into
gold. Amichai’s work rejects preciousness in all
senses committing itself to motley, unrefined real-
ity. The poetry is strong as iron alloy is strong, and
meant for everyday use.
Because of his conversational voice and his vi-
sual metaphors, Amichai translates well. His eleven
books of poetry have been rendered into no fewer
than twenty-nine languages including Afrikaans,
Catalan, Chinese, Drentish (a Dutch dialect), Es-
peranto, German, Slovak, Urhobo (a Nigerian di-
alect), and Yiddish. My own Hebrew being limited,
for the most part, to the Sabbath and Festival Prayer
Book, I have had to rely on English versions. Com-
paring English versions of Amichai can be a frus-
trating task: many have tried their hands, and
individual poems may make separate appearances
under different titles in books more often than not
out of print. On the whole, the most powerful and
shapely renditions have been produced by (or in
collaboration with) the English poet Ted Hughes,
and by the American poets Chana Bloch and
Stephen Mitchell in the Selected Poetry of Yehuda
Amichai,which has just been reissued with new
translations by the University of California Press.
Quotations that follow are drawn primarily from
Bloch and Mitchell—some of their translations
along with Amichai’s original Hebrew are included
in this issue. When poems do not appear in Selected
Poetry,or when lines have seemed to me arguably
more forceful in Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948–1994,
I have instead quoted from their more compendious
collection.
Characterized by abrupt turns of thought and
metaphors so far-fetched that they can recall
Samuel Johnson’s antipathetic description of
English metaphysical poetry (“the most heteroge-
neous ideas are yoked by violence together”),
Amichai’s poetry nevertheless stays socially engaged
and readily accessible. A story circulates that when
Israeli university students were called up in the
1973 Yom Kippur War, each packed up his gear,
a rifle, and a volume of Amichai’s poems. And one
can understand the ethics and emotional appeal of
a writer just old enough to be a teenage soldier’s
father, who stands with impeccable pre–World War
II Zionist credentials, and whose poetry speaks with
an uneffete, commonsensical authority, particularly
about the dilemmas and losses of war. It is not sur-
prising to learn, then, that Amichai’s books have
been best sellers in Israel since the nineteen fifties;
nor that he has shunned Tel Aviv cafe society,
choosing to live instead in less arty, historically lay-
ered Jerusalem, where he is often seen carrying
bags of fruits and vegetables from the marketplace.
His stance is perhaps best summed up in one of his
favorite expressions of value—used by him to de-
scribe the sort of language he prefers as well as to
praise his favorite authors (among these, the
Prophets; the medieval rabbi-poet Samuel Hanagid,
who wrote out of a mixed Jewish and Arab culture
during the Moorish reign in Spain; and the urbanely
ironic and colloquial W. H. Auden): Yehuda
Amichai is “down to earth.” “God’s hand is in the
world / like my mother’s hand in the guts of the
slaughtered chicken / on Sabbath eve,” he tells us;
and “doubts and loves / dig up the world / like a
mole, a plow.”
In a 1992 Paris Review interview, Amichai
tells a story about how, during his World War II
service in a Palestinian unit of the British army (his
family having immigrated to Palestine in 1936), he
first came into contact with modern English
poetry—an incident quite literally “down to earth”:
Between 1944 and 1946 we did a lot of underground
work—smuggling arms and Jewish immigrants into
what was then Palestine. We began preparing, on a
small scale, for a Jewish state—we were actuallyNot like a CypressAmichai’s work
rejects preciousness in all
senses committing itself to
motley, unrefined reality.
The poetry is strong as iron
alloy is strong, and meant
for everyday use.”