ABSTRACT
Despite Robert Frost’s famous remark that poetry is “what is lost in translation”, there are times when translation works. Here’s an example, an incisively lovely poem—in translation—by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. 1 Amichai, who died in 2000, is much revered in his native land and considered by many to be the greatest modern Israeli poet. His themes, in his many books written over a long European, Jewish, Israeli, twentieth century lifetime, tend to be experiential rather than literary. He was celebrated in particular for writing in colloquial Hebrew. AmIchai drew on the Talmud for much of his orientation to the ordinary experiences of living, loving, losing, and dying. Here is a piece of a longer poem sequence from his book Open Closed Open (2000), the book title itself a translation of a Talmudic phrase. The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I’m thinking how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor’s office. 5Even those who haven’t learned to read and write are precise: “This one’s a throbbing pain, that one’s a wrenching pain, this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain and that—a dull one. Right here. Precisely here, yes, yes.” Joy blurs everything. I’ve heard people say after nights of love and feasting, “It was great, I was in seventh heaven.” Even the spaceman who floated in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, “Great, wonderful, I have no words.” The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain— I want to describe, with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains. I think this funny, sweet, sad poem works beautifully in English because it grows out of trenchant observation of universal experience. It does not depend—as poetry often does—on the native diction and the allusive resonances of its original language and so translation is less of a problem than it might otherwise be.
