Israeli Poetry: A Contemporary Anthology PDF
Preview Israeli Poetry: A Contemporary Anthology
Page i Israeli Poetry Page ii JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editor, Alvin H. Rosenfeld Page iii Israeli Poetry A Contemporary Anthology Selected and Translated by Warren Bargad & Stanley F. Chyet INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON Page iv Disclaimer: This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 88591 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 88591 list will be represented without their diacritical marks Copyright ©1986 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. © All rights for the original Hebrew versions are reserved by the authors. Versions of a number of these translations appeared in Ammi, Jerusalem Quarterly, Midstream, P.E.N. Israel 1974, Shirim, and TriQuarterly. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Israeli poetry. (Jewish literature and culture) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Israeli poetry—Translations into English. 2. English poetry—Translations from Hebrew. I. Bargad, Warren. II. Chyet, Stanley F. III. Series. PJ5059.E3187 1985 892.4'16'08 8448247 ISBN 0253331404 1 2 3 4 5 89 88 87 86 Page v To Arlene, Rob, and Adena and To Geri, Michael, and Susan Page vii Contents Introduction 1 Amer Gilboa 13 Abba Kovner 35 Haim Gouri 57 Yehuda Amichai 79 Dan Pagis 103 Natan Zach 125 David Avidan 147 Dahlia Ravikovitch 171 Ory Bernstein 191 Meir Wieseltier 213 Yona Wollach 235 Bibliography 255 Suggestions for Further Reading 259 Hebrew Sources 261 Index 271 Page 1 Introduction Israeli poetry? To earlier generations the prospect of any sort of Israeli literature would have seemed extraordinary, chimerical, even miraculous. A famous visitor to Ottoman Palestine in the 1860s—Mark Twain— found there a land that sat "in sackcloth and ashes," a land "desolate and unlovely"; Jerusalem herself was ''become a pauper village," "mournful, and dreary, and lifeless"; all around her was "dismal scenery . . . a hopeless, dreary heartbroken land." If the land was "sacred to poetry and tradition," 1 it was beyond imagining that new poetry could be produced there. Before we turn to that poetry, it will be helpful to contemplate tradition and to distinguish Israeli literature (which Twain's generation could not have anticipated) from a larger, much older literary phenomenon, Hebrew literature (of which he and his contemporaries surely had some awareness).2 It ought to be kept in mind, as we consider what Israeli poets have achieved in recent decades, that there has been no time since the biblical period began—that is, no time in the past four thousand years—when Hebrew has not been put to literary use. Until this century, of course, Hebrew literary productivity almost invariably reflected Jewish religious commitments, not secular values. Whether the literary expression was poetry or history or liturgy or law or philosophy, it was bound to be a religious, and not at all a secular, instrument—if only because before the French Revolution and the ensuing wave of modernism, no sharp line could be drawn between the secular and the religious in Jewish experience; both were thoroughly interwoven in an entire way of living and of looking at the world. In any case, Hebrew was never a dead language, never a forgotten or an abandoned idiom. On the contrary, it was the thread that ran through all of Jewish history. It was inevitably a major foundation of Jewish identity precisely because the Jewish community had never allowed it to die. That is why, when a century and a half ago Jews came into substantial contact with the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forms characteristic of Western and Central Europe and had to adapt themselves to the evolution of a confusing modern world, Hebrew could serve them as a sort of natural moralizing force. Everyone with a modicum of Jewish education had some access to it, though only the intellectual elite ever really mastered it. Still, in theory at least, all Jews had in common the heritage of the Hebrew language and its literature. If ideas of a revived national life for the Jews were to prove valid, Hebrew would have to be recognized as Page 2 central to the enterprise; though less than a vernacular, it would have to play something of the role that Italian—the lingua toscana—played in the Risorgimento, and German—Hochdeutsch—in the eventual, if shortlived, unification of the Kaiserreich. Hebrew, after all, could claim tremendous prestige, not only among Jews who regarded it as a bridge between past and future glories (and what is valued more than "glories" in the psychic economy of an emergent national liberation movement?), but also among nonJews, even unfriendly nonJews, since both Christianity and Islam owe so much to biblical Judaism and have been compelled to regard Hebrew antiquity as a source for their own spiritual aspirations. Hebrew, then, gave Jews a certain status, however grudging it may have been, in Christian and even in Moslem eyes, because neither Christianity nor Islam was conceivable without the biblical— that is, the Hebrew—past. Hebrew in consequence contributed markedly to Jewish selfesteem. All these factors were influential during the past hundred years, when Jews in Europe began creating a modern literature of their own. A key though never an exclusive role was naturally enough assigned Hebrew as this new Jewish literature took shape to express the changes overtaking Jewish life and to mitigate European resistance to the hope of Jewish equality. The Hebrew literary effort in the Diaspora always involved a struggle, often one surpassingly bitter and complex. On the one hand, even when Jews confronted secular modernity, the religious norms that had for so long been virtually identical with Hebrew literary expression could not be set aside entirely. On the other hand, modernist Jews who prized their Jewish identity and wanted Jewish distinctiveness to survive found it necessary to develop something Hebrew had not known to any significant degree—not for centuries at any rate—belles lettres, a literary product that could address the changes increasingly visible on the Jewish street and could accommodate European secular modernity rather than expend its energies mainly on questions of religious concern. This effort could not be "organic" in the way it was organic for writers in English or French or German or Russian, languages all widely spoken as well as written by large populations and not the special property of intellectual or cultural elites. Hebrew's role as a vernacular—if any—was very limited, and the language had to struggle fiercely for the right to reflect Jewish experience in the modern world. The creators of modern Hebrew had to pit themselves against determined opposition to the modernization of Hebrew and against the charge that they were dismissing religion and courting heresy. In addition, they had to contend with the greater popularity of other Jewish languages—most notably Yiddish, of course, but in the Mediterranean, Ladino or JudeoArabic—and they had to struggle against the languages of the nonJewish peoples in whose midst Jews lived Page 3 and with whose social and cultural institutions Jews wanted to amalgamate. In any case, it was only in 1890 that Eliezer BenYehuda's Hebrew Language Council was organized and only in 1910 that his monumental Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew began appearing. Israeli literature is, of course, not identical with Hebrew literature. Israeli literature, that body of writing produced in Erets Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and ultimately, after 1948, in Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, is on the whole a much more organic growth than the modern Hebrew literature created during the past century outside the Promised Land. Israeli literature, after all, has emerged from and reflects the experience of a sizable population, one that speaks as well as reads and writes Hebrew. In that sense, Israeli literature is a much less exotic, much less eccentric phenomenon than the Hebrew literature written in the Ukraine or Southern Poland or Paris or Berlin or New York. Israeli literature is not at utter odds with its environment and need fear no serious linguistic competitors. The Zionist achievement, notwithstanding its defects and imperfections, is a tremendous one. No national revival in the world exceeds it in intensity, drama, and self realization, or in the level of its cultural expression—and that achievement, whatever else it is, is a Hebrew achievement. Hebrew, in short, is identified with a remarkably bold and successful enterprise, the reconstitution of Jewish national life and sovereignty in the promised land of Jewish history. Its success gives Hebrew, Israeli Hebrew, great éian and energy but also poses problems whose proportions are not inconsiderable. Israel is geographically part of the Middle East—and indeed is a major factor in contemporary Middle Eastern consciousness. Yet as astute an Israeli intellectual as Shulamit Hareven defines literary Israel as a territory whose borders skirt presentday Manhattan and nineteenthcentury Odessa, with Czernowitz somewhere in between. She would prefer a more Mediterranean Israel, though she surely knows that such an Israel is, in literary as well as political terms, still very much within the realm of utopian fantasy. 3 Yoram Bronowski, too, is clear on this point: that Israeli literature moves willynilly on paths determined by European literature.4 It does seem that, for literary purposes, the Israeli sensibility is incontrovertibly a EuroAmerican sensibility. Very little about Israeli belles lettres can be called Levantine, even though a sizable proportion of the Israeli population (a segment that includes such authors as A. B. Yehoshua, Nissim Aloni, and Erez Bitoun) has Levantine or Oriental antecedents. From a Middle Eastern perspective, then, all Israelis, even those of Moroccan or Persian or Yemenite origin, are European; their literature is European; their outlook is alien or external to the Middle East. This detachment from the Levant is both a blessing and a curse. It is surely related to the morbidity that Natan Zach detects in so much Israeli
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