Review by New York Times Review
I HAVE ONE selfish quibble with the expansive, magnificent new book "The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai," edited by Robert Alter. It excludes a personal favorite, "The Eve of Rosh Hashanah." Every year, on the occasion of its title, I read the poem aloud. In Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell's translation, it begins: The eve of Rosh Hashanah. At the house that's being built, a man makes a vow: not to do anything wrong in it, only to love. - and ends: And whoever uses people as handles or as rungs of a ladder will soon find himself hugging a stick of wood and holding a severed hand and wiping his tears with a potsherd. I share it with my family and my friends, Jews and non-Jews, poetry lovers and those who have made their distaste for poetry known. I often share poems I love, but nothing ever gets a response as enthusiastic as "The Eve of Rosh Hashanah" does. It reminds us - because Amichai knew we sometimes need reminding - to treat one another with decency and care; to love, not to exploit. It is useful, and usefulness mattered to Amichai. Chana Kronfeld, in her penetrating new monograph on the poet, THE FULL SEVERITY OF COMPASSION (Stanford University, $55), quotes him: "'The main thing is to be useful,' Amichai would often say. ... Providing useful poetry was indeed something he was always proud of, especially when it was ordinary human beings, not the mechanisms of state or institutional religion, that would find some practical application for his words." Amichai was so famous in Israel that, as Mel Gussow wrote in his 2000 New York Times obituary, "walking in Jerusalem, his home for many years, he would be recognized and accorded the attention that in the United States might be reserved for a movie star or athlete." Both Alter and Kronfeld (many of her translations, with Chana Bloch, also appear in Alter's book) disclose a deep concern about the peculiar burden of Amichai's popularity in Israel that feels both corrective and protective: They are not only the poet's exegetes and translators, they were also his friends. Amichai's popularity - facilitated by the clarity and immediacy of his poems, and a tendency, in Alter's words, to "think of Amichai primarily as a vernacular poet of everyday experience" - has been a deterrent to understanding that "his language is scarcely as vernacular, and not at all as simple, as it is often imagined to be." More insidiously, in Kronfeld's reckoning, these impulses have positioned Amichai - who was born in Germany in 1924 and arrived in Palestine with his parents in 1936 - as a de facto Israeli state poet, canonized if not calcified. "The revolutionary Amichai has been occluded by his very canonicity," she writes. "Amichai's oeuvre - like Brecht's and Auden's - offers an unrelenting critique of the dominant ideology of its time." (Anyone who cringed, as I did, on hearing William Blake's "Jerusalem" sung at the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William will recognize the trouble here.) But accessibility is serviceable to usefulness. For his part, Amichai - whom Alter has called "the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David" - wore his celebrity casually. Public adulation did not inflate his sense of the poet's role: It was more important to him to be a man who wrote poems than to be the figure known as the Poet. Even when his language is at its most elevated and prophetic, humility and an ardent humanity are threaded through the whole of his output. Even in his many poems that begin with the words "I am," there is always the impression that we, both as his readers and fellow travelers in a difficult world, are as much a part of his poetic enterprise as his self. One of his best-known poems, "Not Like a Cypress," from the 1958 book "Two Hopes Away," contains not a single "I." In Stephen Mitchell's translation, it begins: Not like a cypress, not all at once, not all of me, but like the grass, in thousands of cautious green exits, to be hiding like many children while one of them seeks. This situates the speaker low to the ground, very much of the earth, among a great, but not grand, multitude, among the rest of us. In this early poem, Amichai's supple, surprising way with simile is evident. There's an even more arresting example in the volume's first poem, "When I Was a Child" (also translated by Mitchell): Only my mother's words went with me like a sandwich wrapped in rustling waxpaper. To say that Amichai's language is simple, and closely reflective of everyday speech, flatters all of us who speak every day. Leon Wieseltier, another of his translators, has written that "Amichai's famous ?spoken' language is spoken by nobody but Amichai." The innumerable instances of sheer, imaginative gorgeousness in his poems hardly feel quotidian. To suggest, likewise, as many have, that his foremost concerns are the stuff of everyday life suggests that most of us spend our days preoccupied with love and war and God. (But that might be the truth.) And in his treatment of all these, his major themes, Amichai is by turns defiant, playful, wise, weary and mournful - yet never cynical. Love and God often appear in a tangle. Take the first two exquisite stanzas of "But We Must Praise," in Alter's translation: But we must praise a familiar night. Gold borrowed from the abyss. Cypresses rose forever. Far away, long hair still flows, Lord of the loss of all. What are you doing to me, faraway woman? You hung me as on branches with weeping thoughts. From far away your hand touches me as if testing my bridges. They bear the weight and tremble. Yours is the kingdom. Discussing this poem, Alter has said that Amichai's great subject as a love poet is "the inevitability of the end of love." As a poet who writes of God, his great subject may be God's nonexistence. Later, in "A Poem on God's Ways," Amichai returns to the grass of "Not Like a Cypress": God's ways in the old orange grove in the Sharon. He lets me walk on them, among black trees. Only I know green. I'm a man of below. Amichai was a "man of below," a man very much of this earth. That's what supplies the initial jolt of familiarity and recognition a reader feels when confronted with his poems. (I detect in the "belowness" here, too, a suggestion of the eros that is also abundant in Amichai's poetry.) A single semester of adult-education Hebrew does not equip me to judge the nuances of the translations. But an experience I had while taking that class stays with me when I read Amichai. In the Jewish seminary where I took the class, I saw a poster soliciting volunteers for its soup kitchen. I told the teacher, a rabbinical student, that I was thinking of volunteering, because it was so convenient to my office. He smiled wearily and asked, "Is serving others supposed to be convenient?" Amichai urged compassion from the beginning of his life as a poet - "Compassion is what we dearly need," he announced in a poem in his first book - to the end. But he never suggested it was convenient or easy: Instead, it must be met in its "full severity." Auden - whom Amichai first read as a soldier stationed in Egypt during World War II, whom he admired and came to count among his friends - famously wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Some of us hold fast to the belief that poetry must make things happen, that, in order to matter, it must act upon its readers in vital ways that are sometimes even transformative. The useful and beautiful poetry of Yehuda Amichai can make much happen: It might just make us more compassionate, and more humane, for having read it. ROSIE SCHAAP is the author of a memoir, "Drinking With Men," and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Amichai (1924-2000) arrived in Israel in 1937 and wrote in Hebrew. He saw action on the front line during the Israeli War of Independence of 1948-49 and again in 1956, but he is no war poet. Editor Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, translates many of the poems and provides a succinct introduction and notes. In this selection, poems from all Amichai's books are represented, including the entirety of his final collection, Open Closed Open (2000). As Alter points out, and it quickly becomes clear, Amichai is accessible in translation; indeed, the work of all 15 translators is uniformly high. His work also deserves to be called universal. As is always the case with great poets, Amichai describes his own environment in his own terms, yet we find in his perceptions our world. His concerns are our concerns made clear and intelligible, and his feelings are our feelings more deeply felt. They Fooled Us ends, unspilled blood / cries out louder than blood / that's spilled. We hear the biblical echo and know the literal truth of the statement. This is an indispensable collection, packed with unforgettable poems.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Over his long career, Amichai (1924-2000) became the best-known poet of modern Israel and was admired in translation around the world. This mammoth and ably assembled selection combines existing English versions (by Chana Bloch, Stephen Mitchell, Ted Hughes, and others) with new ones by Alter. The book follows Amichai from early adulthood and the founding of Israel, through residences in Jerusalem and on the Mediterranean, through hot war and cold peace, and into old age. As Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California-Berkeley, explains in his compact preface, Amichai's Hebrew survives translation well even though it is saturated in Biblical and Jewish liturgical cadence. Amichai wrote prolifically, in love and sorrow, about the land and the struggles over it. Yet it may be as a poet of embodied erotic desire that Amichai has had the widest appeal. His love poems will go on being read and studied, cherished and sent as billet-doux. And this casual, open, yet very literary poet seems to have anticipated his fate: "I who lose things describe in passionate words what I love," Amichai recalled. "I whose house will be razed and whose body will rot/ praise the new houses/ and the bodies still fresh and filled with love." Agent: Deborah Harris Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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