“And I Will Dwell Amongst Them, Amongst Each One:” The Individual Life as a Sanctuary in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
A personal tribute to Chana Bloch, key translator of Amichai’s poems
Author’s note: The following essay was inspired by my recent participation in an AWP panel honoring Chana Bloch. Panelists were invited to consider Chana Bloch’s influence on their own poetry.
--By Yehoshua November
As an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, I studied under the poet Ruth Stone. During my first workshop turn, she announced to the class that my poem sounded like a translation, albeit not a bad one. Confused and embarrassed, I returned to my college apartment. On my desk, I spied a copy of the first poetry collection I had ever purchased, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the second section of the book composed of Chana Bloch’s translations of Israel’s leading poet. This was 1999. Amichai would pass away one year later, a few short months after the publication of Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation of his final volume, Open Closed Open. I had just entered a relationship with—and began writing poems devoted to—a dark-haired young woman with a space between her front teeth, the woman I would marry less than two years later.
This is to say, from the outset, even when I was unaware of it, my poetry and personal life have been significantly shaped by Chana Bloch’s translation work. Perhaps, as a side note, I should admit that, despite my Jewish day-school upbringing, I had managed to spend enough time on baseball cards, reruns of MacGyver, and other unspecified pursuits to manage not mastering modern Hebrew. Certainly not well enough, at the time, to read Amichai’s poetry in its original language. Thus, for me, like so many, Bloch served as the access point to one of the greatest poets of the last century.
Several years ago, I attended a poetry reading by the recently deceased Polish poet Adam Zagajewksi. When asked what was lost in reading his poems as translations, he said, “Nothing. I feel, even as they are rendered in English, these are my poems.” As a devoted non-Polish speaking fan of Zagajewski, this answer felt like a fantasy fulfilled. According to Bloch and her co-translator Chana Kronfeld, the same may not hold true in the case of Amichai translations. As Bloch and Kronfed point out in an essay on translating Amichai’s final poetry collection[1], much of Amichai’s puns and word associations go unrepresented when rendered in other languages. They add that modern Hebrew is a kind of “echo chamber” of its Biblical precursor so that everyday contemporary speech resounds with meanings rooted in antiquity. They point, for example, to the Hebrew word shem, which translates as name. The plural form of the word, Shemos (names), serves as the Hebrew title of the second book of the Torah (referred to in English as the book of Exodus). Shem also brings to mind Hashem, an informal title for the Divine, a way to refer to God without mentioning one of the sacred, un-erasable names.
Given the absence of the rich diction that flavors Amichai’s original Hebrew, Bloch and Kronfeld wonder at Amichai’s popularity amongst his non-Hebrew speaking readers. [2]They conclude that he “crosses the language barrier” because “[h]is images make poetry out of the non-poetic things of ordinary life” and because he “makes a virtue of accessibility.” In introducing one of my poems included in The New York Times Magazine—the one time I enjoyed this distinction--Matthew Zapruder noted that my poetry is characterized by “radical clarity.” As a Chassidic Jew, being called radical in the largely secular poetry world did not come as a surprise to me; however, I never imagined the accessibility of my poetics would be the reason. Is my poetry really radically clear? And if so, how did I arrive at this atypical aesthetic? Is Amichai’s work—exceedingly accessible poetry further simplified when translation strips it of association and word play—also radically clear? Perhaps Ruth Stone’s observation about my student poetry as a kind of translation has remained largely applicable. If it’s true my poetry is more accessible than that of many of my contemporaries, perhaps, at least in part, this is due to many years of reading Bloch’s translations of Amichai. It’s strange and pleasurable to think this may be the case. Interestingly, in a tribute to his mother, Jonathan Bloch writes[3], “When I was a child, [my mother] wrote the word ‘clarity’ in black marker on an index card and taped it to the wall above her typewriter, where she would see it when she looked up from writing. I remember seeing that index card with the word clarity, in fading marker, hanging there for many years. I think that clarity was her lifeline, to the end.”
Looking back, it’s not hard to trace a number of my poems’ rhetorical underpinnings to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Employing the language of negation in “When I Banged My Head on the Door, Amichai writes[4], and Bloch translates, “…and I didn’t scream ‘Mama’ and I didn’t scream ‘God.’/ And I didn’t prophesy a world at the end of Days/ where there will be no more heads and doors.” Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s more than likely this same language of negation, and particularly negation of spiritual idealism, that sparked or pushed along my poem “I Made a Decision,” which reads:
Once, before either of us was twenty,
in the cafeteria, I watched your mouth
enclose itself around a plum.
Because I was young and you were beautiful,
I did not say, This is just a physical body nourishing itself.
And I did not say, Perhaps this is the other half of my soul.
I made a decision with a young man’s body,
and my soul continues to thank me.
Aside from questions of craft, a recent tribute to Bloch I participated in asked its panelists to consider Bloch’s exploration of her Jewish faith and her desire to examine what she called “the inner life.” Here, too, I think it’s instructive to return to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Amichai departed from a life of tradition as an adult. One finds no shortage of poems doubting the Divine in his body of work. In this spirit, Bloch and Kronfeld note[5], “Amichai’s reception outside Israel has tended to oversimplify the meaning of his work, blunt his irony, and even—so help us!—present him as a poet of fuzzy feel good religiosity.”
Yet, I think a traditional Jew, especially a Chasidic Jew such as myself, can find Amichai relevant and compelling, even without overlooking or distorting his iconoclast streak. This is because Amichai’s work echoes a central Jewish theology relevant to notions of the inner world and Jewish faith. Or at least his work offers a secular iteration of that theology. [6]As Chassidic and Midrashic teachings point out, the Divine instruction to build the Tabernacle, and by extension the Holy Temple, reads[7], “Make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell in them.” In the verse, the Divine voice does not note, “I will dwell in it,” as grammar would dictate. Rather, it states, “I will dwell in them,” in each one, implying that true construction of a Sanctuary entails each individual sanctifying the ordinary moments of his or her life, locating holiness in the mundane. For this reason, and in contrast to ascetic religions, traditional Jewish practices engage the body and the world. According to the Jewish mystics, each time a Divine command is performed with a physical object—and Judaism abounds with such commands—divine light, Or Ein Sof, is drawn down to, and absorbed by, the item in use. Surprisingly, in this theology, one’s body and its daily undertakings constitute a kind of Divine Temple, especially when acts are carried out with Divine purpose. And, in a sense, the Temple the individual creates proves more central to daily life than the larger structure of the communal Holy Temple.
The ambition to sanctify the quotidian is present in much of contemporary poetry, but few poets seem to see the body and the individual life as a kind of sanctuary to the extent that Amichai does. Or in Amichai’s secular iteration, the interior world of memory seems just as important as larger real-world history and geography. In this sense, the personal and historical, the interior and outer worlds, compete, coalesce, and get conflated, recalling the Jewish theology of the literal communal temple structure and the idiosyncratic temple of each individual life. Given Bloch’s focus on the inner world and Jewish faith, it’s not surprising she was drawn to and served as a leading translator of Amichai’s poetry. Let me close with a Bloch translation of an Amichai poem which appears to best represent the individual-life-as-temple ethos. Significantly, in the poem, Amichai refers to David’s Citadel, a Herodian tower in Jerusalem whose name calls to mind the Holy Temple, which, in the Song of Songs, another work Bloch co-translated, is also referred to as David’s Citadel. Here, quite literally, Amichai, like the Midrashic-Chassidic teachings, prioritizes the individual human temple of daily life over the larger historical structures:
A prose poem from "Tourists,"[8] by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch
2
Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down
my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their
guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with
the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman
period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said
to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch
over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the
left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables
for his family."
Photos: Amichai above; Chana Bloch below
