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Hebrew Poetry in the New Millennium
Amir Or
We are used to regarding the Bible as religious scripture, which was translated in the past to a multitude of European languages and is generally read today in archaic vernaculars. But this is not the case for the Hebrew speaker. Since Hebrew was revived as an everyday spoken language in the early 20th century, a linguistic gap of 2,000 years was bridged.(See Jack Fellman, "Eliezer Ben-Yehuda: A Language Reborn," Ariel No. 104, 1997.) On the one hand, an Israeli school pupil can read and understand the Bible in its original tongue, and on the other, if King David could have leafed through a book of contemporary Hebrew poetry, he would have had little difficulty in understanding its language.
Beside its spiritual and historical content, for the Hebrew reader, the Bible is a cultural and literary heritage, rich in rhythm, music, and forms of speech. Most of the books of the Bible are pure poetry in various styles and on different themes: the stories of the creation, the patriarchs, victory and love songs, prophecies, hymns, and so on. In short, the beginning of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") is also the beginning of documented Hebrew poetry, some 4,000 years ago.
However, the writing of Hebrew poetry did not cease with the compilation of the biblical canon, and even after the destruction of Judea by the Romans at the beginning of the first millennium ce, Hebrew literature was created continuously in the lands of the Jewish dispersion. The ancient language of the scriptures had not been spoken in everyday life for two millennia, but continued to be studied and used in prayer in every Jewish community. Religious and secular Hebrew poetry was composed throughout the generations in the east and in the west, in far and near countries, in regions now located in Iraq, Spain, Italy, Yemen, Egypt, Poland, Russia and Germany. For centuries, the Hebrew poetic tradition was thus enriched by other traditions in style, theme, and lyrical forms; yet not unlike Latin, it lacked the vivid dimension of everyday colloquial speech. There is no other example in human history of the successful revival of an unspoken, semi-fossilized language such as was Hebrew with the rise of Zionism at the end of the 18th century and the return of Jews to the Land of Israel.
Poets were the spearhead of the drive towards the renewal of Hebrew speech in practice, and until the middle of the 20th century, their poetry was celebrated both for its intrinsic merit and as a national achievement. The two giants of the era, Saul Tchernikhovsky and Chaim Nahman Bialik, replaced the high biblical rhetoric of their predecessors, which did not suit the vivid national and linguistic reality developing in pre-state Israel. Their task was to create a new wide linguistic panorama that would enable the expression of the youthful pioneering revolution taking place, and of many new aspects of life that had hardly been dealt with by Hebrew poetry prior to that.
Their contribution created a radical tradition that continued after them, when each successive generation of poets proceeded to dethrone the previous one, meeting the new challenges of their time, and bridging the gap between modern life and its artistic expression more and more. During the 1940s, the second radical wave, led by Natan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky, called for avoiding figurative hyperbole, outdated idioms, and religious connotations that were alien to the zeitgeist of the time.
The most prominent spokesmen of the third and last radical turn in the 1950s were Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach and David Avidan, whose generation was influenced by American and English trends rather than European. They called for a simpler poetic language, linked to everyday expressions and phrases; free verse and experimental poetry.
The revolutionary zeal typical of three generations of immigrants lingered for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, until it totally died out when post-modern ideas came to the fore. In retrospect, these revolutionary poetic waves were radical in temperament due to historical circumstances, but were, in fact, part of a natural development accompanying the normalization of poetic speech in the newly burgeoning Hebrew-speaking society.
Nowadays, even though immigration to Israel is still taking place, most Israeli poets are native-born and their mother tongue is Hebrew. For the last two decades of the century just past, the fervour of poetic ideologies and disputes was totally discarded in favour of a less vehement exploration of Hebrew language and culture. Indeed, contemporary poetry in Israel feels free to employ and even mix a large variety of styles and forms, both traditional and modern, to answer the needs of specific themes or atmospheres.
This more relaxed mood of poetic creation reveals other aspects of Hebrew poetry, and perhaps provides a less ideological and more concrete understanding of the disputes that took place during generations of immigrant poets who, to a large extent, had to adapt European models in order to create poetry in Hebrew. To the native poet, the Israeli reality and the unique possibilities and limitations of Hebrew are the unquestionable basic conditions.
For example, in terms of limitations, Hebrew does not have a large vocabulary, and unlike Indo-European languages, it often relies on a single word rather than on the syntax and phrase. Each word can have several meanings depending on the context. Often, in speech or prose, when technology and science are invoked, it has to borrow foreign words or create new ones. But this is not so in Hebrew poetry, for in this case, linguistic trends, ever since biblical times, have created another kind of richness. A single word can contain diverse meanings, all connected through the logic of symbol and metaphor, rather than through empirical facts. The long history of Hebrew literature adds endless connotations and allusions to each word, and thus a verse can offer the reader parallel readings, whose mutual relationship may be an art in itself, consisting of inverse, complementary or paradoxical connections.
The immigrant poets faced the huge task of bridging traditional and modern poetry, exploring free verse, tonal metre, and so on, and making them an organic part of Hebrew verse. Yet what was terra incognita in their time, is today our natural inheritance, and in the ongoing creative work of contemporary Israeli poets, new nuances of language are continuously unveiled through poetic expression.
A seed that was sown in the sand waits years for the rain
Amir Or
This poem will be a poem of another century, not different from this one.
This poem will be securely concealed
under heaps of words, until
between the last sand grains of the hourglass,
like a ship inside a bottle, it will be seen, this poem:
the poem that will speak of innocence. And common people that ostensibly
were shaped by time, like tardy gods,
will listen to it for no reason that wasn't there before,
rise their backs like snakes
from the junk, and there won't be anywhere else
to hurry from, and it won't have an end
different from its beginning. It won't be rich
and won't be poor. It won't bother anymore to promise
and keep or carry out its utterances
and won't scrimp, or sail there from here.
This poem, if it will speak to you, woman, it won't call you
muse-babe, and won't lie with you like its fathers;
or if to you, man, it won't kneel or kill, won't apply makeup
and won't take off its words and flesh, as it has not has not-
what. Maybe now I'll call it here, the bad poem
of the century: here, sick with health it barely walks
drags its legs in the viscous current of thoughts of the time
or is stopped to show papers and to have its trivia counted
with arithmetical beads. The inventory: flowers and staples,
corpses (yes, no worry), tall glasses. After staples -
also butterflies, and many footprints and other hooks and shelves
for the arguments of scholarly criticism, and also just to fool around, teeth
against teeth, in the anarchic smiles of a chameleon that doesn't know
its colours have long since turned into a parable. Or in incomprehensible tranquility
to try someone else's luck in games of
to and fro that have no goal other than, let's say,
a bit of fun the length of a line. Spread orange on the blue
of evening sky: now, plaster a little cloud. Climb
on it, see below: sea of sea, sand of sand.
Or fingers. Ten jointed worms
move in inexplicable charm. Now they encircle
a ball whose circle is faulty, wonderful, fleshy, further more,
you may say a word (it's a fruit, it's called
a peach). And these words
their taste is full of the taste of
its being, of a tone that accompanies the sight with wonder
and not with a thought-slamming sound. And this is the poem:
it sings, let's say, to the tar that stuck to the foot on the shore,
to plastic bottles, to its own words. It
only sees: black atop white, transparent, or grainy.
It is not less naked than you. Also no more. Only in this exactness
that has no measure, but by the curves of a female-dog,
a pot of cyclamens, or a hair strand on a bathtub railing.
The creatures here don't want to know. The creatures
there, that only want, are, for now, a possibility
of becoming the creatures that are here, of becoming this antiquity
that has nothing to say other than me, me, without limit
without you. A dog lies on a step in the afternoon
sun, and does not distinguish itself from the flies.
Translated by Helena Burg
Amir Or was born in Tel Aviv in 1956 and studied classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A poet and essayist, he translates from ancient Greek, Latin and English into Hebrew. He is editor of Helicon, a journal of contemporary Hebrew poetry. He has published four collections of his own poetry.
The Bride Flew Up
Nurit Zarchi
You can see her shoes
in flight above the clouds of my name,
her dress ripped
like love that struggles to survive.
A cold shadow blots out the voice in the dream.
This is the place where hands don't reach.
Here you may eat directly from plate to mouth.
Things lose weight,
my skin turns into winter,
one eats one's biography,
and vapours rise from the mouth.
The dress is still waving in the smoggy skies,
caught on the edge of a star like a lost soul.
One morning when I got up early,
that is, in the evening:
Frozen palaces stood in cement puddles
forgetting that they began in tears.
I found her sprawling and full of holes
like a shell eaten by a seagull.
Ophelia, I called, what do you want, an arm?
I haven't got one to give you. For a contrasting melody
you must cooperate with the enemy.
But she was swallowed by her own emptiness,
left with the tail of a movement
branded like an insult or an engraving.
Translated by Lisa Katz
Nurit Zarchi was born in Jerusalem and brought up on Kibbutz Geva. She studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University, and teaches creative writing and poetry at that university and at the Levinsky Teachers-Training College, Tel Aviv. She is a prolific writer of poetry and childrens' books and has been awarded many prizes.
Metamorphoses
Liat Kaplan
A.
Out of your metamorphoses I seek my childhood,
She turns her back on me and flees, transparent as a dream. Desert winds blow the hems of her dresses, curl her tresses, strip me of my skin. I breathe the dark haze of her neck, my lip petrifies her limbs. I forget her and hear: the dull echo of her skull landing between my parents' faces.
B.
Like Ovid I understand only what lives, that is,
moves, rots, dries up, transforms itself, dies: becomes other.
At Telemachus' touch the old king overturns, like longing,
from outside to inwards, the fierce-looking ships sail away from him.
C.
Not the metamorphoses of tormented dreams: you wake up one morning
and you are a huge insect. But slowly and in a civilized manner:
the spindly insect joints grow slowly in your body, you diminish,
love, explore trash, carve your name in the dust on earth.
D.
"Silently the still tree moves its top with no sound."
Translated by Irit Sela
Liat Kaplan was born on a kibbutz and now lives in Tel Aviv. She studied philosophy and Hebrew at Ben-Gurion University. She has published four volumes of poetry and is a member of the editorial board of Helicon poetry magazine.
Twilight
Agi Mishol
Slanted light soft and yellow
suddenly took pity on my room
and before my very eyes dust motes
lit up in gold.
And also glass vases lit up
and the perfect spider webs
and blues that cannot
be described
were caught
in the window frames
And also my beloved books crowded on the shelves:
light caressed The Notebooks
of Malte Laurids Brigge
and The Memoirs of Adrianus
and Saramago
and Wallace Stevens, neighbour of
Pessoa and Cavafy
and a pocket guide to India
stuck among them.
Outside a car drove by
a woman called the kids in for supper
and my sloppy body on the sofa
moved nothing,
I am here
a bowl of the moment
and I have no questions.
Translated by Vivian Eden
Agi Mishol, poet and translator, was born in Hungary in 1947. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and lives on Kfar Mordechai, a moshav in the Coastal Plain. She teaches literature and creative writing and has published several collections of poetry. She was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Creativity in 1995.
The Ballad of Alcohol Valley
Ronny Someck
Only sharpen a knife blade along its mate's hip.
In Alcohol Valley the sex knife spins on its tip.
Rock'n'roll cops push together straight ahead.
By the sweat of crimes - our daily bread.
Oh, girls of the Valley,
Barbies in the dangerous game room,
who will part your legs tonight,
what lullaby lower nylon lashes
over plastic eyes.
The Valley is a dream, a bad dream.
The moon is the nightlight of Dr. Freud.
P.S.
About the meaning of dreams in the Valley:
a girl seen walking a dog - a sign she is lonely.
A girl seen walking without a dog - a sign
she forgot the dog at home.
Translated by Vivian Eden
Ronny Someck was born in Baghdad in 1951 and was brought to Israel as a baby. He has published seven collections of poems. He received the Prime Minister's Prize for Literature in 1989.
One From Here
Salman Masalha
A poem for the late hours of the night
It changes so fast,
the world. And for me it's
now absurd. Things have got
to the point that I've stopped
thinking about the fall.
Because, after all, from here,
there's nowhere to go.
And anyway, even in the park
the trees are uprooted and gone.
And at times like these, it's dangerous
to go out in the streets.
The road is so wet.
Blood flows in the main artery.
I count them:
One from here, one from there.
I count them
like sheep, until
I fall asleep.
Translated by Vivian Eden
Salman Masalha was born in the Druze town of M'ghar in the Galilee in 1953. He studied Arabic literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has published three collections of poetry as well as literary criticism and translations in Hebrew and Arabic.
The Book
Asher Reich
When I moved to a new home,
my forgotten Bible suddenly turned up.
A Bar Mitzva gift, the only thing
I took with me, when I abandoned the home of my youth
forty desert years ago.
I leafed through the book. Some pages were stuck together
as if with a deep secret. Cain, of course, still killed his brother.
For every murder, two other brothers sprout in the field.
Goliath strips off his armour and goes on a lunch break
from his eternal battle with little Israel.
The Philistine's head is already adorned with rubber bullets
like a black man's curls. The first astronaut,
Elijah, rises heavenward in a tempest as a normal thing.
UFOs, made in Israel, sail through Ezekiel's sky.
I kept on leafing. The pages were already black with blood
of sanguine wars that continue of their own accord.
Only the sins remained as white spots. Prophets
had vanished from the book to prophesize far away. Kings fled into exile.
Angels flew back to the caves of the firmament.
From his couch, God rose sadly and turned off the light for us.
Translated by Vivian Eden
Asher Reich was born in Jerusalem in 1936. He has published eight books of poetry and has won several literary awards. He received the Prime Minister's Prize for Creativity in 1989.
From "Stone"
Dan Armon
*
He tells me
watch the stone.
Watch the stone again.
What changes in you
as you look.
The colours sing as they vanish.
What remains
of the one you embraced who's no longer with you
rustling in the dark.
The dawn will cover him and you.
The white stain, the stone,
will fade in your sleep.
Your breath too
you won't hear.
I don't answer him.
I don't see him.
I obey.
*
When you meet the stone
Leave it alone, I said,
placed in the palm of your hand
sealed in its secret
its endurance greater than yours
lean on it.
Wait with it,
it is a piece
of earth
when the surrounding landscape is snuffed out
you're alone in the dark
and its weight is in your palm
and your weight
listen to the weight
for the weight
is its entire life
life comes
from you
see how it suckles
in your palm
borne, ascending, taking wing
assenting
Translated by Gabriel Levin
Dan Armon was born in Jerusalem in 1948. He has a degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied the Alexander Technique in Jerusalem between 1976-8 and now teaches it in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Berlin. He has published six books of poetry, and is a recipient of the Prime Minister's Prize for poetry and the Pinsker Prize for playwriting.
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