Risa Domb: Erev tov. Good evening to you all and
welcome. The Hebrew evening of Jewish Book Week is dedicated to the memory
of the beloved poet Yehuda Amichai who passed away three years ago. Israel's
well-known poet was born in Würzburg, Germany, in 1924 and moved with
his family to
Eretz Yisrael in 1935. He was a prolific poet and the recipient
of many literary prizes, at home and abroad, including the prestigious Israel
Prize, and his work has been translated into some twenty nine languages.
He used plain, colloquial style which was revolutionary in Hebrew verse
in the 1950s when he began to publish. However, what distinguishes his
poetry is the juxtaposition of the plain colloquial with the biblical
and post-biblical of the Hebrew language. This is manifested in the poem
that was chosen for the first day issue cover which appeared on the 3rd
September 2001, together with a stamp bearing his portrait. The poem evokes
the Jewish prayer for the dead, El Maleh Rahamim, which Amichai deconstructs
in order to fill it with a new meaning for the Israelis who die unnatural
deaths in their many wars.
I will read to you the poem first in Hebrew and then Eli will read it
in its English translation.
[Reads poem El Maleh Rahamim in Hebrew]
Eli: God, full of mercy.
God, full of mercy
The prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy
Mercy would have been in the world
Not just in Him.
I who plucked the flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys.
I who brought corpses down from the hills
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I who was king of salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I who use only a small part of the words in the dictionary.
I who must decipher riddles I don't want to decipher
Know that if not for the God full of mercy
There would be mercy in the world
Not just in Him.
Risa Domb: Thank you. Now it is with great fear and trepidation
that I will introduce our distinguished guest of this year's Jewish Book
Week, the Israeli poet Meir Wieseltier. Now so that you understand my
fear and trepidation, I would like to read to you just a part of a recent
email which Wieseltier sent to me from Israel. It goes as follows:
'By the way, the note in the programme has some strange bits and disinformation
about myself. I don't happen to be an avowed atheist, agnostic would be
closer to the facts. Nor am I poet-in-residence at the University of Haifa,
but an associate professor there. I left Am Oved thirteen years ago and
have translated seven (not four) plays by Shakespeare.'
In view of these comments, I will say minimum, very few words, and watch
my words very carefully!
Like so many Israeli writers, Yehuda Amichai included, Meir Wieseltier
was not born in Israel. This is an interesting cultural phenomenon distinguishing,
to my mind, Hebrew literature from any other literary corpus. He was born
in Moscow in 1941 and from 1946 to 1948 he wandered, with his family,
through Poland and occupied Germany, arriving in Israel in 1949. During
the 1960s and 70s, he was involved with the editing of several avant-garde
literary journals, including the influential journal Siman Kriya. His
first book of poetry was published in 1963. From 1986 to 1989 he was poetry
editor at Am Oved publishing house and is now an associate professor,
as we heard, at Haifa University, teaching drama.
Wieseltier is the author of some thirteen or so books of poetry and translated
from English, Russian and French poetry, prose and plays, including the
seven Shakespeare plays, a marvelous translation. His own work has been
translated into many languages and the University of California Press
is about to publish a selection of his poetry in English translation.
So, very soon, those of you who do not read it in Hebrew, will be able
to read it in translation.
Meir Wieseltier is the recipient of important literary prizes in Israel.
He was awarded twice the Levi Eshkol Creativity Prize, the Elicha Beli
Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Translation Prize and, in the year 2000,
Israel's highest cultural honour, the Israel Prize. So, it is self-evident
that he is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary Israeli
poets. Whereas Amichai is closely identified with Jerusalem, Wieseltier
is closely identified with Tel-Aviv. In his non-conventional, at times
outrageous, poetry, he often reacts to political events and social reality
incorporating slang and colloquial language. His poetry can be upsetting,
expressing with a dazzling intellectual virtuosity scepticism and denial.
He reflects on human folly and man's fundamental aloneness in the world.
Yet, the dominant mood of his poetry has been described as 'a kind of
bleak tenderness', revealing concern, compassion and sensitivity.
It is with great pleasure, Meir, that I invite you to read some of your
poetry. Thank you.
Meir Wieseltier: Good evening, everyone. I want to make several apologies.
First, for my English accent that you will have the questionable pleasure
of listening to for the next hour, or luckily a bit less than that. Second,
I must confess that any reading of my poems in English is a sort of an
embarrassment to me, not only because I think that someone with an accent
like my own should be prohibited by law from reading poetry in public
in English. But maybe this is not so great, because in most civilised
countries now, including UK, the law has lost its interest in poetic activities
so they never interfere. But everything I am going to read here are poems
translated by the American poet Shirley Kaufman, who is an American Californian
poet. She is very much American and very much Californian, not only in
the language she uses, but in every other thing. With some sides of my
writing, she has great difficulty, because most Americans, especially
perhaps from California, for example, do not have an historical imagination
and everything that is connected with that creates a big difficulty for
them. But, on the other hand, to my understanding, they are the most honest
translations done of my poems up to date. So I can't read other translations
because I have strong reservations about other translations. So I have
to read this translation.
Then there is another thing. Because she completed the translations about
three years ago of the selected poems, so everything I read here was written
at least four or five years ago. There is nothing recent which is contrary
to my habits when I read in Hebrew because I usually only read poems that
I have written in the last two or three years. I will perhaps also read
one or two poems in Hebrew so that you can hear the sound of them a bit
later.
As we are at Jewish Book Week, I thought I'd start by reading some poems
that have something to do with Judaism, and why not begin from the beginning?
So I have a very old poem called Abraham. It was written sometime in the
mid-sixties, so I have decided to start with that.
'The only thing in the world Abraham loved was God.
He didn't love the gods of others;
Those people who slept with their wives every night
And stuffed themselves with meat and wine.
Their gods were made of wood or clay and painted vermilion
Then sold like onions in the market to the highest bidder.
He figured out his own God and made himself His chosen.
He loved that God above everything else in the world.
He wouldn't bow to the gods of others.
He told them, 'If you go right, I'll go left. If you go left, I'll go
right.'
He told them, 'You can't accuse me of a get rich scheme.'
He refused to give or take anything except with God.
If only he had asked, he'd have got it.
Anything. Even Isaac, the only son, the trusting heir
But if there is a God, there is an angel.
Abraham didn't value a thing in the world but God.
Against him he never sinned.
There was no difference between them.
And like Isaac who loved his uncouth son
And like Jacob who slaved for women
Who limped from God's thrashing all night
Who saw angel gliders only in dreams.
Not Abraham. He loved God and God loved him
And together they counted the righteous of the cities before wiping them
out.'
