Volume 24 155
revolving door. A private man forced to wear a pub-
lic mask, he sings of division. Yet the strain he feels
in his life does not come across as strain in his
work.
All the days of his life my father tried to make a
man of me,
so that I’d have a hard face like Kosygin and
Brezhnev,
like generals and admirals and stockbrokers and
financiers,
all the unreal fathers I’ve established
instead of my father...
I have to screw onto my face the expression of a
hero
like a lightbulb screwed into the grooves of its hard
socket,
to screw in and to shine.
(“Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela”)
As we can see from this wry self-portrait,
Amichai knows how to leaven hard truths with
humor.
But Amichai embraces the public sphere only
through the self. In an early poem he compares his
life to Venice: everything that is streets in others is
“love, dark and flowing” in him. He submits all of
his experiences to the pressure and presence of love
before they can make their way into a poem. In this
way he has, and no mean feat this, reclaimed the
genre of the love poem for serious poetry. Personal
without being private, serious without being
solemn, he seeks relief and ease through the balm
of love, writes as a man motivated to “go out to all
[his] wars” and come back on account of love.
Amichai adopts a prophetic tone with remark-
able ease. “He doesn’t have seasons enough to
have / a season for every purpose,” he writes in “A
Man Doesn’t Have Time.” When we speak of Bib-
lical simplicity, we are really talking about a man-
ner of address, a certain directness. Amichai has
always been able to speak directly rather than em-
ploy metaphors for his thoughts. Metaphors are
contained within the body of his poems rather than
serving as a casement for them. His poems begin
where most poems end. He begins without a mask,
with the screen torn off and the scream in its place:
Now that I’ve come back, I’m screaming again.
And at night, stars rise like the bubbles of the
drowned,
and every morning I scream the scream of a new-
born baby
at the tumult of houses and at all this huge light.
(“Jerusalem, 1967”)
Amichai has been blessed in his translators:
Assia Gutmann, Ted Hughes, Harold Schimmel,
Ruth Nevo and now Chana Bloch and Stephen
Mitchell. They have all ably conveyed the concrete
particulars of his world, but Bloch and Mitchell get
inside the text and render a subtler, more complex
and formally expert Amichai than we have seen be-
fore in English. Many people who know both He-
brew and English well think that the Mitchell/Bloch
translation is excellent and that it supersedes the
earlier translations, but those of use who have been
reading Amichai since the first translations ap-
peared find it difficult to shake off their authority.
There’s a world of difference in the placement of
a word. Assia Gutmann translated a line in one of
his most memorable lyrics as “Hair dark above
his thoughts,” which isolates in an uncanny way
the hair from the head, locates the source of the
thoughts in the brain beneath the hair, turns the
physical perception into an image of the character’s
psychological and spiritual condition and, in doing
so, interprets the “thoughts” for us:
Out of three or four in a room
One is always standing at the window.
Hair dark above his thoughts.
(“Out of Three or Four in a Room”)
Stephen Mitchell’s version returns us to the
thing itself, “his dark hair above his thoughts.”
[Emphasis added.] Gutmann’s image stresses dis-
placement, isolation; Mitchell’s version—and he
uses a comma after the preceding line instead of a
period—stresses continuity of being in the world,
ordinariness.
Reading the Selected Poetry,it occurred to me
that Amichai’s poetry resembles the work of James
Wright more than that of any other contemporary
American poet. Both poets are able to submerge
their imaginations in momentary events; both root
their poems in specific places (Israel, the Midwest)
and move from the anecdotal to the universal; both
use a narrative voice but write lyrics rather than
narrative poems; both explore the possibilities of
poetry through contexts and placement. They share
the capacity to speak directly while retaining an
eerie edge to what they say—and unsay. In Wright:
The carp are secrets
Of the creation: I do not
Know if they are lonely.
The poachers drift with an almost frightening
Care under the bridge.
(“Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight”)
America,
Plunged into the dark furrows
Of the sea again.
(“Stages on a Journey Westward”)
In Amichai:
Jerusalem, the only city in the world
where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.
(“Jerusalem, 1967”)Not like a Cypress