The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Thirty-Nine (Amichai)

San Carlos Wildflowers

John Fowler

This week I've fallen in love with a new (to me) poet, Yehuda Amichai, whose selected poems I picked up at Half Price Books a few weeks ago and have been devouring since. Amichai writes in Hebrew and has been translated into more than forty languages. The poems in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (the collection I've been reading) were translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.

According to another well-known translator, Robert Alter, "Yehuda Amichai, it has been remarked with some justice, is the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David.” And I have to say, I can see why. The poems are stunning. Both universal and deeply personal, they deal with the most important aspects of humanity through compelling, brilliant metaphors and images.

Before you read the poem I've selected for this week's Mnemosyne, here are a few lines that really struck me from other poems: "God's hand is in the world / like my mother's hand in the guts of the slaughtered chicken / on Sabbath eve" (From "God's Hand in the World," translated by Stephen Mitchell). And from another poem ("Yehuda Ha-Levi"), also translated by Stephen Mitchell: "But in the white fist of his brain / he holds the black seeds of his happy childhood. / When he reaches the belovèd, bone-dry land-- / he will sow."

Yehuda Amichai

Photo by Layle Silbert

Wildpeace
By Yehuda Amichai

Translated By Chana Bloch

Not the peace of a cease-fire,
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill,
that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds—
who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.

Golems, Jazz, and Naked Magic with Tony Barnstone

This Sunday, 3/25/12, at 7 PM EST, I will host the incredible, versatile Tony Barnstone on Tiferet Talk for a conversation about poetry, editing, and translation. Barnstone is the recipient of many awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, and the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. He is the author, editor, and translator of over a dozen books, including collections of poems and writings about poetry. His poetry collections are Naked Magic, Impure, Sad Jazz: Sonnets, The Golem of Los Angeles, and Tongue of War, a collection of dramatic monologues set in the Pacific during the Second World War.

Yusef Komunyakaa says of Barnstone's Impure, "I admire Tony Barnstone's Impure because of the collection's unrelenting believability and lyrical certainty. Plain-spoken and magical, this poet knows how to make imagination and the real world collide softly. There is a clarity in Impure that reaches beyond the formlessness of modern life. Borders are crossed in the psyche and the flesh, and this collection seems like an elongated song that embraces the most elusive moments buried in language and nuance through the pure naming of things - a mantra of what is and what is dreamt - that takes into the sacred territory what no ordinary compass can plot or unplot."

Robert Olen Butler says of Barnstone's Tongue of War, "Brilliant in conception, comprehensive in its humanity, exquisitely voiced by a stunning range of characters, Tongue of War is not only a deeply moving work, it is an endearingly important one. Tony Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved."

Please join us live or listen to the archives at blogtalk or itunes any time after the show has aired.

I leave you with a beautiful poem by Tony Barnstone:
 

Vision of Milk 

from Readymades at The Drunken Boat

Because I wished I were wise,
because I wanted to become air,

because I am in love with zeros,
I swam in deep light-distances.

I saw my shadow wavering before me;
I saw a footpath of light.

I saw clouds like swelling milk udders;
they flowed like milk into my hands.

I watched the pregnant moon give birth to the sun,
and I saw the blood.

I watched the world drown in shallow waters,
and I caught that little whiff of carrion,

and it almost destroyed me,
but instead it made me stronger,

because even a wound has the power to heal,
because to live does not mean to be sick,

and because the galaxy is a woman and she is good
I took her breast in my hand and I drank.