"God has Pity on Kindergarten Children" [by Yehuda Amichai]

God has pity on kindergarten children.
He has less pity on school children
And on grownups he has no pity at all,
he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first–aid station
covered with blood.

But perhaps he will watch over true lovers
and have mercy on them and shelter them
like a tree over the old man
sleeping on a public bench.

Perhaps we too will give them
the last rare coins of charity
that Mother handed down to us
so that their happiness may protect us
now and on other days.

-- Yehuda Amichai

This is a grand and famous poem. It is the first poem in the Selected Amichai translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Harper, 1986). Someone has tinkered it with it but only very slightly. The variations from the text here are three: in the third to last line, there's a comma after "Mother handed down to us"; in the pentultimate line, "their happiness will protect us" [rather than "may protect us"]; and the last line is "now and in other days" [rather than "on other days"].

Leaving aside the ethical question of taking someone else's translation and making it your own just by changing one or two words, I wonder which version of the ending readers prefer. For what it's worth, I like "may" more than "will." Toward the very end of the 1850 edition of "The Prelude," Wordsworth changed "may" into "will" in the last clause of these lines from the original (1805) edition: "what we have loved, / Others will love; and we may teach them how." I've always felt that this change was a mistake.

Mitch Sisskind notes that the poem "discloses the authentic and seemingly arbitrary or even heartless aspect of divine judgment, 'gevurah.' As Job said of god: 'though he slay me, yet i will honor him.' As Mel Brooks asked of God: 'Why do you have to be so strict?'"

-- DL

Comments

[Laura]

I also would prefer "on other days" the "now and," as with "will" rather than "may," also suggests a sureness that is not vague enough to comport with what the poem means; these are hopes against previous evidence submitted earlier.