A Hebrew Poet

Songs of Jerusalem and Myself.
by Yehuda Amichai.
Translated by Harold Schimmel. Harper & Row 120 pp. $5.95.

yehuda Amichai was born in Germany in 1924, and in 1936 emigrated to Palestine, where he eventually fought in the Palmach during the War of Independence. He has published three volumes of poems in Hebrew (as well as novels and plays), the earliest dating from 1948. The present volume is a collection of competent and sometimes masterful translations (by the poet Harold Schimmel) from all three volumes. (It is actually the second volume of translations to appear; the first, entitled simply Poems, was done by Assia Guttman and published in 1966.) This is an excellent collection—it includes Amichai's two beautiful and brilliant song cycles, Jerusalem 1967 and The Achziv Poems—and deserves to be widely read. Amichai's poems must compel the attention not only of devotees of modern Hebrew literature, but of anyone concerned with the state of contemporary poetry in general.

Amichai's poems are rooted in the omnipresent landscape of Israel; the topography of his shifting emotional life is very much the shifting topography of the land for which he fought: the ruggedness of the hills, the straining intransigence of the desert, the sweating sun and bitter salt and indifferent winds of the beach, the confusions of the Old City of Jerusalem made new—all are causes, settings, personifications of his feelings. These are poems of place, and their almost tangible evocations of the violent contrasts and mysterious beauty of the Israeli landscape infuse them with a materiality no less worn and vital than the poet's own.

Amichai's is a poetry without a poetics, invoking nothing but the poet's own rich, painful, and sometimes epiphanous experience; and it is an indication of his stature, at a time when “honesty” in writing has become trite to the point of cliché, that he is able to make the confessional mode seem once again an apt vehicle for conveying truths about the world. As a poet Amichai demands of himself an unrelenting transparency, a self-consciousness which is a form of sustained vulnerability in the face of experience. His poems are soundings of himself, readings of his strength to absorb experience without sacrificing this necessary vulnerability. They are also carefully wrought expressions of a life which is itself not carefully wrought, which is constantly at the mercy of time and its own frailties:

I sign the guest book
of God: I was here, I stayed on,
I loved it, it was great, I was
   guilty, I betrayed.
I was much impressed by the
   warm welcome
in this world.

The poet discovers that his loneliness is not a wall, but a gate: he takes his finitude and forges from it a poetic testimony that depends for its integrity on nothing but what he is trying to convey—that he is a man, that he is just Yehuda Amichai, but that that is fine.

Amichai has a bitter kind of sixth sense that intuits almost immediately the limits of situations, their inevitable ends:

Longing for the past
colored our eyes with a double
   assurance
of what will never change
and one can never return to—

His poems are measures of change, of dauntless time:

We wait for rain more than ever.
There are many grapes this year;
   the last are
yellow like the color of wild
   wasps
which are their death from
   within.

He is always dating things: himself, his father, his loves, the land, Jerusalem. All these moments, Wordsworth's “spots of time,” are evoked but never frozen. And the poet lives a very full life; he is poet, lover, father, son, soldier, traveler, Jew. But since he looks nowhere outside his existence to find its meaning, his roles serve to elucidate one another, one experience becoming the metaphor for another. Amichai constructs his poems by balancing one moment against the next, by forcing the many dimensions of his life upon one another in the hope that the life itself will emerge whole.

This is most dramatically apparent in the wistful way he writes about the Jewish religious tradition. His is hardly a religious sensibility, and yet religious symbols still have meaning for him of a surprising kind. The sacred in his poems is a metaphor for the profane, the appreciation of the modest purpose and order implicit in the vagaries of the everyday:

God's hand in the world
like my mother's
in the guts of the slaughtered hen
on Friday.
What does God see beyond the
   window
as he puts his hand into the
   world?
What does my mother see?

The intense sexuality of Amichai's lyrics must also be taken in the context of this insistence that life as a whole is to be found immanent in each of his experiences. For the sexual realm offers the most charged initiation into the experience of limit, as consummate pleasure passes inevitably into consummate pain. The account of sexual pain in The Achziv Poems is probably the most haunting rendering of the erotic ever undertaken in Hebrew verse.

Amichai's experience of the world is above all an experience of its intractability, of the strenuous resistance of his situation to his will. There is thus a powerful tactile element in his poems' imagery: he writes often of hardness, of rock and stone. But the poet's sense of his own self is likewise of something hard, weighty, virile, perdurable. It is, in other words, a self well suited to the world in which it finds itself—a self for which the center must hold. Amichai's muse is resiliency, and personal courage; his campaign in his poetry is to turn the richness of circumstance to the advantage of a self that will remain intact despite pain and pleasure; he sees the punishing world much as Keats did, not as a vale of tears but as “a vale of Soul-making.”

Amichai has achieved a kind of precarious peace with the oscillations of happiness and sadness that constitute his life, and out of this peace rises the elemental lyricism of his poetry. The love poems in particular are written with a grave gentleness, a sense of wonderment at the ephemeral nature of it all. His poems offer seasoned comfort, the humble contentment that comes of resignation without surrender. In this spirit Amichai prays:

My father, my king, groundless
   love
and groundless hate have formed
   my face
like the face of this dry land.
The years have made me a taster
   of pain. . . .
My father, my king, may my face
be not torn by laughter or weep
   ing.

My father, my king, make all
   that happens
between lust and sadness
not torment me too much; make
   all things
I do against my will
seem by my will. And my will
like flowers.