15. The Place Where We Are Right . By Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.

The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.

But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard In the place where the ruined House once stood.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) is recognized as one of ’s finest poets. His poems, written in Hebrew, have been translated into 40 languages. “Yehuda Amichai, it has been remarked with some justice,” according to translator , “is the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David.” His imaginative and accessible style is credited with introducing contemporary Hebrew poetry to American and English readers. His first book of poetry, Now and In Other Days (1955), announced his distinctively colloquial voice. They were followed by Poems (1969) and Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (1971), both co-translated by , who became a good friend and advocate of Amichai’s work. Later works translated into English include Time: Travels of a Latter-Day Benjamin of Tudela (1976), Yehuda Amichai: A Life in Poetry 1948-1994 (1994), The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1996), Exile at Home (1998), and Open Closed Open (2000). Amichai also published two novels, including Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1968), and a book of short stories.

Born in Germany in 1924, Amichai and his family fled the country during Hitler’s rise to power when Amichai was 12 and settled in Palestine. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war he fought with the Israeli Defense Forces. The rigors and horrors of his service in this conflict, and in World War II, inform his poetry. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amichai noted that all poetry was political: “This is because real poems deal with a

Yehuda Amichai, continued....

human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making,” he said. It was during World War II that Amichai began to be interested in poetry, reading modern English and American poetry, by authors such as Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot. Although Amichai’s native language was German, he read Hebrew fluently by the time he immigrated to Palestine.

After World War II, Amichai attended Hebrew University. He taught in secondary schools, teachers’ seminars, Hebrew University, and later at , the University of California-Berkeley, and Yale University. Robert Alter said Amichai was “accorded international recognition unprecedented for a modern Hebrew poet.” In Israel, his books were frequently bestsellers, and in 1982, Amichai received the prestigious Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in poetry’s language.” Among his many other honors and awards, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

While he became known as an “accessible” poet whose work translated seamlessly into many languages, Amichai’s style is much more complex in its native Hebrew. Amichai frequently exploited Hebrew’s levels of diction, noted Alter in an article for Modern , which are generally based on historical usage of words. Alter continues: “Amichai’s exploitation of indigenous stylistic resources is often connected with his sensitivity to the expressive sounds of the Hebrew words he uses and with his inventive puns, which are sometimes playful, sometimes dead serious, and often both at once. But what is most untranslatable are the extraordinary allusive twists he gives to densely specific Hebrew terms and texts.”

Yehuda Amichai died in Jerusalem on September 22, 2000.

Source: www.poetryfoundation.com