Robert Alter - Yehuda Amichai - Israel's National Poet - Living with Poems in Times of "Continuing Warfare": Before the Holocaust, Israel Reborn1948-49, and Military Self Defense in Wars 1949 - 2024

Israeli Soldiers Lost in October 7th War early hours

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Robert Alter on Sefaria see links here. The Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection, over 55 Sheets.

Yehuda Amichai - Robert Alter translation of poems - a podcast with Alter: A Few Lovingly Chosen Poems - February 2023 - Israel at 75.

"Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is widely beloved as Israel’s “national poet.” His iconic poems are read at public ceremonies and Memorial Day services, but many of his lesser-known poems equally evoke the land and its history. Born in Germany, Amichai emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1936, witnessed the birth and growth of the state and fought in many of its wars. With eminent translator/critic Robert Alter, we take an in-depth look at a few of Amichai’s poems and unlock the secrets of their lasting appeal."

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Yehuda Amichai was an exuberant person with a lively, impish sense of humor. He was, at the same time, a melancholy man. Perhaps the note of melancholy, accompanied by a certain hint of fatigue, became more pronounced in his later years, but Amichai’s sense of fun never entirely left him. Both traits of his personality are present in his poetry in shifting combinations and permutations, with the playfulness actually feeding into the darker brooding of his poems.

"Amichai’s playfulness is most spectacularly evident in his use of figurative language. He did not, as far as I can tell, have a fixed aesthetic program for using a particular kind of imagery. Rather, his imagination reveled in seizing possibilities for metaphor from unlikely directions (he was similarly inventive in conversation). Amichai’s characteristic move was to light on some familiar object and, in a quick gesture, usually not felt as a conceit, use it to focus an emotion or even serve as a gateway for vision: “Longing is shut

up inside me like air bubbles / in a loaf of bread.” “My girl left her love on the sidewalk / like a bicycle. All night long outside and in the dew.”

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"In regard to the substance of Amichai's poems as well as their language there are more complexities and greater depth than meet the casual eye. He is obviously an intensely personal poet, with a large number of his poems explicitly anchored in autobiographical experience.

This is surely part of his appeal to readers, first in Israel, then in America and England and across the globe. In fact, many of his early poems are a plea for the preciousness of private experience in a time of continuing warfare. Poems such as :

Her Steps Were Not There"

resonated powerfully for Israeli readers between one war in 1948-49 and another in 1956, and well beyond that period, because they expressed with such poignant directness the desperate cherishing of a private world and private loves when historical reality tore lovers apart and dragged young people who had once been sheltered children to the pitiless exposure of the battlefield.

But there are elements in much of Amichai's poetry that go beyond the merely autobiographical and beyond the local Israeli situation, even as both are vividly evoked. Thus, "The Smell of Gasoline" concludes with these two lines: "A jet makes peace in the sky for all, / For us, and all those who love in the fall." These lines explicitly echo the concluding words of the kaddish, which any Hebrew reader would immediately recognize: "He who makes peace in his heights, may He make peace for us and for all Israel."

The poem about a young A soldier's wrenching experience when his call to the front compels him to part from his girl (the smell of gasoline is from the jeep or truck that is about to take him away) becomes a larger statement about the fragility of life in violent times. Instead of God in his heavens providentially protecting his people, modern lovers live under the provisional and intermittent protection of a fighter plane circling above. The poet's personal plight, without the slightest didactic insistence or affectation, is ultimately played out on the big stage of life in the upheavals of the twentieth century, between the arch of the heavens above and the earth below.

Some of Amichai's poems about the anguish of living in a world of relentless armed conflict are general statements about this condition rather than explicit expressions of the poet's personal experience. A few of the justly famous among these are:

"God Takes Pity on Kindergarten Children,"

"Rain Falls on the Faces of My Friends,"

"God Full of Mercy," and

"To the Full Severity of Compassion."

The last of these, characteristically, evokes two biblical allusions- God's promise to make Abraham's seed as countless as the sand on the shore and the writing on the wall of Belshazar's feast in the book of Daniel- in order to define a world where we are all lonely people, vulnerable and countable, and where the dire writing on the wall is everywhere, like graffiti.

Amichai more usually makes his way to the global through a concrete imagining of the personal. The moving love poem, "But We Must Praise," is a vivid case in point. ...

The poem begins with a strong allusion to the opening words of one of the most familiar prayers of the traditional liturgy, "We must praise the Lord of all." Here, however, the object of the praise is "a familiar night. Gold borrowed from the abyss." The Hebrew original of that second phrase is one of Amichai's untranslatable puns, zahav mosh'al mishe'ol. The night of rapturous love is a treasure "borrowed from the abyss," presided over not by the God of tradition but by the "Lord of the loss of all," because sweet love is bitterly transient—-perhaps necessarily transient-and our existence is shadowed by inevitable, painful loss. ...

The largeness of meaning conveyed by the poem is effected without the slightest strain in what looks like simple language, but the speaker's

sense of the preciousness and the fragility of his love plays out under the starry sky, above the abyss, becoming an intimation of the human condition itself. ...

From beginning to end, Amichai is an extravagantly playful poet. ...

The playfulness is exhibited in such manifestly exuberant poems as

"The Visit of the Queen of Sheba," ... Let me quote, as a foretaste of what readers have in store for them in this collection, one complete poem from Amichai's last book, Open Closed Open. It is a take on the Exodus story-that last ghastly night in Egypt when the Egyptian firstborn perished and the Israelites were protected by blood smeared on the lintels, when the liberated Hebrew slaves fled in haste, with no time for the rising dough for their bread- that resembles nothing written by any writer on this story, from the ancient Midrash to Thomas Mann’s Tables of the Law.

....

-“I don't imagine that on the night of the exodus from Egypt

There is an almost shocking explosiveness in the figurative language here, a power of mythic imagining, a mingling of the erotic and the theological, that might be surprising to those who think of Amichai primarily as a vernacular poet of everyday experience. ... He is this as well, of course, but there are also murky depths and soaring heights in his poetic world that are realized through his metaphors and through his often densely allusive Hebrew. ” (xxiv)

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Revised May 5, 2024