ABSTRACT
The Israeli landscape as a whole can perhaps be "read" historically in the sense that an eighteenth-century garden was read, through the placement of monuments, war detritus, memorials, and ornaments which create recognizable emblems of a cultural or political "life" and which evoke a corresponding variety of emotional responses. Yehuda Amichai's landscapes echo the broadest understanding of the Israeli landscape as a collective historical discourse. The primary function of the landscape for Amichai's speaker is, therefore, its signification of the emotion accompanying memory. He mythicizes space according to his previous personal experience of or in it, and also in accordance with the broader collective vision of his generation. Amichai's landscape elements are particularly significant in the context of war, or more precisely the War of Independence, and of love. In the context of love the landscape constitutes less of an aide-memoire for Amichai's speaker than a powerful symbol in his poetry.
