A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves — Simone Weil
Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940), Place Vintimille, a vertical pair of murals, Paris
Dear friends and readers,
While away in Boston, I happily read different books than I usually do when I’m at home (that’s one of the ways I vacation, I break from my usual books to try others), and read poems by and about Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005), an Israeli poet writing in Hebrew who was a passionate protester (among other poets) of the Israeli gov’t’s horrendous (barbaric) policies towards the Palestinian people; she is introduced by Ilana Szobel’s reading of her “poetics of trauma.” A second woman poet I had read before, Alice Oswald (b. 1966), but not this unusual translation from Homer’s Iliad, Memorial. “; Oswald reaches deep into the Iliad to find its core electrifying depiction of death-in-life and the natural world. I bring in Simone Weil’s The Poem of Force, which I need to re-read. A fourth witness is Christa Wolff whose Cassandra and Four Essays brings forth the same territory.
The poetry intrigues me: all of it is translated. I am reading Ravikovitch through Szobel’s translations after all. Oswald’s translation (and Weil’s) shows that one must sometimes be diametrically unfaithful to one’s text to bring out truths in it and about life. All three show how gender continually shapes what we write.
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I was so stirred by Oswald’s stanzas: what she did was omit all features of Homer’s poem except the descriptions of each person’s death, which the poem abounds in, and are often accompanied by some succinct review of his life; and the similes and metaphors, which the poem equally abounds in. These taken together bring home to the reader the visceral and moving core of the poem.
Here is one series:
….
Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork
Like snow falling like snow
When the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
Like flutters of silence hurrying down
To put a stop to the earth at her leafwork
SCAMANDRIUS the hunter
Knew every deer in the woods
He used to hear the voice of Artemis
Calling out to him in the lunar
No man’s land of the mountains
She taught him to track her animals
But impartial death has killed the killer
Now Artemis with all her arrows can’t help him up
His accurate firing arm is useless
Menelaus stabbed him
One spear-thrust through the shoulders
And the point came out through the ribs
His father was Strophius
Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip
Like when a mother is rushing
And a little girl clings to her clothes
Wants help wants arms
Won’t let her walk
Like staring up at that tower of adulthood
Wanting to be light again
Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted
And carried on a hip
Beloved of Athene Pherecles son of Harmion
Brilliant with his hands and born of a long line of craftsmen
It was he who built the cursed fleet of Paris
Little knowing it was his own death boat
Died on his knees screaming
Meriones speared him in the buttock
And the point pierced him in the bladder …
In her afterword Eavon Boland (who has edited a volume of anti-war 20th century poetry by women) suggests Oswald geologizes Homer. For a nanosecond’s visibility, a young man is before us, and each individually horribly cut down as all around them the life of the natural world goes down. From having read other translations of Homer, I know the secret to Oswald’s continual interest is she free translates the death’s with far greater variety than Homer, who is inclined to repeat lines like, the spear went between his teeth, he feel and especially “and his armor clattered upon him.”
Alice Oswald
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The originality of approach, and deep call for peace, for life is matched by and reminded me of Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force, another unusual translation. The text consists of selected passages translated (freely) and embedded in mediations, explanations. At the back is commentary. All of it the poem.
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Lastly I came across in one of the exhibits, Ilana Szobel’s literary critical book on Ravikovitch’s poetry. Since she is not as well-known as the other two women, let me say quickly: Ravikovitch’s father died when she was very young; she spent long periods away from her mother on a kibbutz; two marriages, and one child and serious emotional breakdowns form the autobiographical background of her poems. The early poetry reminds me of Adrienne Rich, and like hers, Ravikovitch moves from the more personally-centered and feminist poem, to large political issues.
For all three women — Ravikovitch and Weil and Oswald — the greatness lies in long lines and narrative so I can share just a little and that plucked out of a larger whole.
Benighted children,
at their age
they don’t even have a real worldview.
And their future is shrouded too:
refugee shacks, unwashed faces,
sewage flowing in the streets,
infected eyes,
a negative outlook on life.
And thus began the flight from city to village,
from village to burrows in the hills.
As when a man did flee from a lion,
as when he did flee from a bear,
as when he did flee from a cannon,
from an airplane, from our own troops.
(“On the Attitude toward Children in Times of War”)
He who destroys thirty babies,
it is as if he’d destroyed one thousand and thirty,
or one thousand and seventy,
thousand upon thousand.
And for that alone shall he find
no peace.
(cr, 208; BK, 197-98)
Terror-struck women scrambled up, frantic,
on a mound of earth:
“They’re butchering us down there,
in Shatila.”
Our own soldiers lit up the place with searchlights
till it was bright as day.
“Back to the camp, marschl” the soldier commanded
the shrieking women of Sabra and Shatila.
After all, he had his orders.
Those sweet soldiers of ours,
There was nothing in it for them.
Their one and only desire
was to come home in peace.
A book on Ravikovitch’s poetry
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
[…] poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch; Alice Osward’s Memorial, a deeply humane vividly alive re-write of […]
Ellen, I read your blog. What a wonderful entry, especially on Alice Oswald, a poet I’m much interested in. Thanks! Ann
‘Hovering at a low altitude’, trans by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, WW Norton 2009, is her collected poems. It’s a wonderful collection
Mary Cresswell
Dear Ellen, Mary, and anyone else who is interested:
I’m so glad that you’ve discovered Dahlia. She is considered by many to be the greatest Hebrew woman poet, and she deserves to be better known in this country.
On my website, http://chanabloch.com/hovering.html , there are links to Dahlia reading one of her best-known early poems, “The Dress,” in Hebrew — you may be interested to hear how it sounds in the original — along with the English translation. My collaborator (and dearest friend) is Chana Kronfeld, professor of Hebrew & Yiddish at UC Berkeley.
There’s also a link to our reading/talk about Hovering at a Low Altitude at the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco in 2010. There we focus on the poetics & politics of translation, introducting Dahlia’s work, and then reading and discussing some of her more overtly political poems.
Best,
Chana
The poem I thought by Ravikovitch and an imitation of Nathan Alterman is apparently by Alterman. Another poem presented by Sobel is said to be the imitation. I don’t see them as that close and prefer Alterman’s. So here’s the poem as a PS to the blog:
BOULEVARDS IN THE RAIN
The city is combed with light and rain.
Profoundly pretty, she is forever shy.
I will go out today, with my laughing daughter,
Among all of those things that have been reborn.
Here is the glass, her name is clearer than ours
And who shall trespass on her icy reflection?
On her threshold, as on the verge of our souls,
Sound departs from light.
Here is the iron, the idol and slave,
The blacksmith of days who shoulders their weight.
Here, my child, is our sister the stone,
She who never weeps.
In our time fire and water have risen.
We pass through gates and through mirrors,
It seems the night, too, is the river of both days,
Upon whose coasts entire lands alight.
It seems we, too, shall arrive by morning
At the last house upon that spacious road
Where the heavens are still standing alone
Where a small boy throws a ball at their feet.
The boulevard is combed with light and rain.
Speak, oh green one, roar!
Look, my lord, with my laughing daughter
I am strolling down your main road.
My undone city fastens her dress.
The smile of iron and stone still floats above.
All of these do not forget the grace
Of one single word of love.’
— Nathan Alterman
I have now acquired Hovering at at Low Altitude. For a start I hope it tells me much more about Ravikovitch’s life — it has sizable introduction. Sobel’s book was very irritating to me as filled with jargon, abstractions and repetitive when it came to discussing her personal life which was central to her poetry. Of course what I liked strongly was Ravikovitch’s condemnation of the barbaric behavior of the Israeli state to the Palestinians (and the politicians who use the military the way they do, and try to bully the US into being even worse) are voted in by the Isaeli people.
[…] I returned from the Bostom MLA I had read some beautiful translated poetry, anti-war, by Alice Oswald and Dahlia Ravikovitch. Since then I acquited a Collected Poetry by Ravikovitch as edited and translated by Chana Bloch […]
[…] I thought of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, also Simon Weil’s translation of the Iliad a Poem of Force, and Uprootedness her commentary on it — both profoundly anti-war, profoundly against […]